Sure, President Bush hates being psychoanalyzed, but let's put him on the couch anyway and try to gauge his reasons for nominating White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court.
Among the appointment's critics in both parties, the common assumption is that Bush picked Miers because he believed himself to be operating from a position of weakness.
The theory is that Bush -- facing low approval ratings, huge challenges in Iraq and the Gulf Coast, and resistance to legislative priorities like restructuring Social Security -- flinched at the prospect of a showdown with Senate Democrats over a known conservative. So he picked a stealth candidate with few public footprints. Even one prominent conservative supporting Miers said, "I don't think it was conscious, but I think he blinked."
That analysis is certainly plausible. But it's not entirely persuasive. For one thing, Bush has never been shy about undertaking big fights even while holding what appeared, by conventional measures, to be a weak hand.
He's often pursued initiatives that lacked majority support in polls at the time he advanced them -- including the Medicare prescription drug plan that relies on private companies, not the government, to dispense the benefit, and the decision to invade Iraq without explicit authorization from the United Nations. For better or worse, he seems less concerned about how his agenda is received by the public in polls than any recent predecessor.
Moreover, Bush this year was reminded that any president, whatever his overall political situation, retains a strong hand in tussles over judicial nominations. Both sides gave ground in the compromise this year that ended a Senate Republican effort to ban judicial filibusters. But the most tangible result of the deal was that several Bush appellate court nominees whom Democrats had blocked are now sitting on the federal bench.
The approval of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice reinforced the message of that earlier scuffle. Roberts' placid path to confirmation suggested that the widespread belief in the political world that modern Supreme Court nominations would routinely generate apocalyptic confrontations was wrong. With each passing vacancy, the rumbles surrounding the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 look more like exceptions than the rule.
