As we have learned more about Harriet Miers since her nomination, we can now glean several important points from Bush's selection of Miers for the Supreme Court and his implied belief that she is qualified for the court.
It's helpful to remember that Bush is not trained as a lawyer. His main experience with lawyers has been on the receiving end of their advice, and it's no coincidence that in selecting Miers, Bush selected a person who has personally represented him. He's not trained as a lawyer, and -- being Bush and not having any intellectual curiosity about fields he doesn't have to know about -- he doesn't know what goes into forming legal reasoning. He's been a consumer of a legal product, but he has no idea how that product is produced.
What Bush is trained as is a manager, and it's clear he believes that's a suitable model for a Supreme Court justice. To him, there's no reason for a justice to have reached any particular conclusion regarding a legal issue, just as for Bush, there's no reason to have already studied and reached conclusions regarding any particular policy position. All Bush does (and is oddly proud of only doing) is consume bullet point memorandums by his aides, assure himself that the aides know what they're doing (or chew them out if he suspects otherwise), and move on.
Of course, the merits of this approach even for an executive are questionable. If the executive doesn't know any of the nuts and bolts of the respective aides' fields, he's reduced to judging other, less reliable indicators of the aides' job performance, such as loyalty and "heart." As revealed in the debacle of Michael Brown's final days at FEMA, Bush didn't know enough about what FEMA was doing to judge whether Brown was doing his job, leading Bush to famously commend Brown for doing "a heck of a job."
But a managerial approach is completely untenable for a Supreme Court justice, because a justice is judged not by the result reached in any particular opinion but by the method used to reach that result. In fact, the single task justices devote most of their time to is writing opinions, and as those of us know who have attended law school and been required to read the fruits of their labor, those opinions are considerably longer than a mere up or down verdict.
And this, to some extent, explains why many conservative thinkers have been so incensed by the Miers nomination. Conservatives thinkers believe in the importance of powerful ideas supported by forceful logic, while Bush only cares about results, and in failing to understand what being a justice is about, Bush has simultaneously undermined the position of all those who believe in the power and importance of logic, thought, and reasoning.
Even many conservatives have admitted that there were holes in Bush's reasoning leading up to the Iraq war, but Bush was able convince the American public not to look too closely. Most Americans just seized on whichever of Bush's various rationales they wanted and didn't focus on the others. Similarly, since starting the war, Bush has managed to make its execution the issue going forward, refusing to be drawn in to questions about the validity of the original rationales.
But this strategy of bait and switch is not an option for a justice. Each justice must write a lengthy explanation of how he or she arrived at a conclusion in a particular case, to be analyzed in law schools for decades to come. And a justice who aspires to increase his or her influence will write opinions not only in those cases the justice is assigned, but concurring and dissenting opinions in other cases, as well.
Like a blind person who has been led by others his entire life and doesn't understand the importance of sight, Bush not only doesn't make convincing, logical arguments himself, he doesn't understand the significance of that skill to others. To him, others just need to be led as he has. Unfortunately, the blind man has just nominated his friend to drive a bus.
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