Tim Grieve on Harriet Miers' qualifications:

The White House on Miers' critics: Sexist, elitist or both?

... There might have been ways for the president ... to sell his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Arguing, as he did earlier this week, that Miers was the "most qualified" candidate and the "best person I could find" clearly wasn't one of them.

... what neither Democrats nor Republicans will be able to gin up is evidence that Miers graduated from something other than a third-tier law school, that she learned at the feet of a federal appellate judge, that she's written seriously about constitutional issues, that's she ever judged anything or that she's ever argued a case before the Supreme Court.

So what's the White House doing now? What it always does: Going on the offensive against its critics. Having failed to persuade its conservative base to look past Miers' middling credentials and trust Bush about her right-wing bona fides, the White House now seems ready to simply smear Miers' opponents as elitists and sexists...

The sexism charge is silly...

As for elitism? Guilty as charged, your honor. Call us crazy, but we think that the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court ought to be selected from among the best developed legal minds in the country. For better or for worse, that means we expect our justices to have undergone the rigors of an education at a top-flight law school and then to have shown, through a lifetime of work at the highest levels of the legal profession, an extraordinary ability to deal with the difficult constitutional issues that sometimes come before the court...


And then, in a later column, he referred us all to Ann Coulter, and was as surprised as any of us to find he agreed with at least some of what she had to say (see post below).

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