October 07, 2005

Ninomania's David Wagner on the Miers nomination:

No, my concern is not that there may now be an SMU grad on the Court. That's to the good. My concern is that open advocacy of conservative legal views is now a definite disqualifier for the Supreme Court, in a conservative administration that campaigned in part on putting more Scalias and Thomases on the Court, and with a 55-member GOP Senate conference. Whether you're in practice, in academia, or on a lower court, the crime of being conservative in a public place now means no one will appoint you to the Supreme Court. It's not even clear that Federalist Society membership will be tolerated when it comes to picking high Court nominees.

Watch for the next generation of conservative legal thinkers to go silent on the big questions, leaving no indication of who they are, making no disciples, and forcing the next conservative administration -- if there ever is another one, which must now be considered in doubt -- to trust to sheer luck in finding them. Assuming, that is, that it even wants to find them.