Tom Tancredo on Scarborough Country

Excitedly and quickly, "We expected someone who would be an intellectual power house to move the court, to influence the court.. . . We need it; we deserve it; and there are plenty of them out there."

This is the guy who thinks that if there's another terrorist attack on the U.S. we should obliterate the Muslim holy sites. Sorry, pal, you wouldn't know an intellectual powerhouse if it sat on your face and wiggled.

Why do we need this person? Will brilliant rhetoric convince Stevens and Kennedy that they should quit allowing their subjective sense of justice and trends in worldwide jurisprudence be overcome by brilliant writing? If so, why hasn't Scalia done any better than he has. We don't need "an intellectual powerhouse", although I'm not impressed that not having a string of law review articles makes you a dim bulb. We need someone with the experience and intelligence to cut through the arguments that have brought us to this pass, and the humility and common sense to just make the decisions to roll back the court's tendency to make policy and be guided by sympathy rather than the Constitution. I think that Ms. Miers can do that more reliably, and, I suspect, more trenchantly than anybody who's concerned with getting off the second string and write big time opinions. A little humility and modesty would be very very welcome. Justice O'Connor apparently came to believe that she and the other justices were endowed by the Constitution with the wisdom and authority to settle all divisions among the people. She doesn't seem to have the sense to recognize that such attempts are more likely to exacerbate those divisions than calm them. That's what politics is for.