Harry Reid, Bush’s Bestest Buddy?

Strange bedfellows, indeed!

Choosing a Supreme Court Justice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor is getting to be a longer process than anticipated. Yet, through all the various twists and turns, there are two constants. One, Democrats would oppose whomever President Bush would nominate. Two, Ted Kennedy will be drunk throughout the nomination process. (Not that I could blame him, really. The only thing more boring than nominating and approving a new Supreme Court Justice would be to let Al Gore run the thing.)

When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace O’Connor, something odd happened. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid praised Miers. Given how Democrats were talking about taking the next Supreme Court nominee through a vetting process that would make Abu Ghraib look like an Amish picnic, Reid seemed…sedate. (On a side note, who else wouldn’t like to see Reid hopped up on truck stop speed just to see if he’d start going at normal speed?)

Seriously, Reid’s greenlighting of Miers was more than a little shocking, but not for the reason you think. Reid might have just gone from opposition leader to wild card in this whole situation. But to see why, we need to go back in time a bit to the John Roberts hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Watching the Democrats on the committee has to be embarrassing for Reid because Roberts and the Bush White House outmaneuvered them by invoking the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Standard. (For the uninitiated, the RBGS is dressing up like a cast member of “Laugh-In.” Oddly enough, Roberts chose Joanne Worley.) Without a paper trail on which to attack Roberts, Democrats were left trying to get people to believe that Roberts couldn’t be a fair judge because he was never poor. We can debate this point, but to have Ted Kennedy make this point is like having a toothless dentist tell you about proper dental hygiene.

But here’s the thing: Reid wasn’t even in on the strategy sessions. Not that his presence would have stopped the flaming train wreck of the Roberts hearings, but he might have steered the structure of the questions from why Roberts couldn’t be a fair judge because he’s never been poor to something that, oh I don’t know, might have had something to do with uncovering Roberts’s legal thinking. Although he wasn’t in on the bull sessions, Reid looked ineffective and the party as a whole looked positively inane. But in a show of bravado, the Senate Democrats swore they would go harder on the next Bush nominee.

Enter Harriet Miers. You could have been in a soundproofed submarine going under the ice in Antarctica and you would have heard the “Awwwwww man!!!!” from Washington, DC, as Democrats realized Bush just played them for chumps again. This time, Reid stepped forward and praised Miers as a good candidate, preempting the Senate Democrats in the Judiciary Committee before they could get a clue about how to approach the Miers nomination.

This serves two purposes. First, it makes Reid into a sympathetic character. After all, if the Judiciary Committee Democrats act like they did during the Roberts nomination, he stays out of the blast radius of the implosion because he’ll appear to be more sensible and moderate by comparison. (You get the same effect by standing next to Michael Moore, and you’ll appear thinner, so it’s a double bonus.)

Second, it’s revenge for what the Senate Democrats did when they left Reid out of the planning stages. By praising Miers out of the box, it sets a tone that his fellow Democrats in the Judiciary Committee can’t maintain if they want to keep the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore/Barbra Streisand/freakazoid liberal wing of the Democratic Party happy, but they will lose more moderate and conservative support. And if they do follow Reid’s lead, they lose the confidence of their base, which was already pretty shaky before the Senate Democrats rolled over with Roberts.

But in purely Republican terms, it’s a win-win for Bush because he’s effectively split the Democrats with two Supreme Court nominees in a row. But with Harriet Miers, he has a bit more help, this time from Harry Reid. I’ve always felt that Reid wasn’t cut out to be an attack dog, which is pretty much what the Majority Leader and Minority Leader positions have become in modern politics. If Miers gets confirmed, George W. Bush will have a lot of people to thank, and at the top of his list should be Reid for helping him, wittingly or unwittingly, clear the path.

And that’s the Bottom Line.

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