That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post. Here’s how it opens:
The failure of a Supreme Court nomination often puts the White House in a bind. But the failure of the Harriet Miers nomination freed George W. Bush’s White House from the bind it had put itself in.
The Miers debacle also ended up helping Samuel Alito considerably—and not just in the obvious way of requiring George W. Bush to make a new nomination for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat.
On that new nomination, the mantra “it has to be a woman” was silenced. Bush also knew that he had to make a pick conservatives would celebrate. He settled quickly on Alito.
The massive gap between Alito’s qualifications for the nomination and Miers’s qualifications also meant that Alito immediately won the respect of even those Republicans who would have preferred a female nominee or a less conservative nominee.
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