I cannot say I’m surprised. Bruce Bartlett is an actual fiscal conservative. He has principles. His loyalty is to his ideas, not to the conservative intelligentsia’s think-tank welfare-state. If I were him, I’d be delighted to be fired for dissent. It’s good publicity for his book; and a sign of his integrity. Memo to Bruce: get a blog. The pressure for herd mentality is less intense when you’re in pajamas in the home office; and you don’t have to hide your contempt for the sell-outs and suck-ups who walk by your office every day.
REYNOLDS NAILS IT: I think Instapundit gets to the core of the Miers problem here:
Despite charges of cronyism, Ms. Miers is not simply the president’s crony, but his lawyer — formerly his personal attorney, and now his presidential attorney. This has already given rise to paranoid theories from the left to the effect that Mr. Bush is trying to protect himself from prosecution growing out of the Plame affair or the Iraq war. These theories are unlikely, not least because Ms. Miers’s current position would probably disqualify her from hearing precisely those kinds of cases. And even if she were not disqualified, there might be doubts about her objectivity that would undermine the court’s reputation.
What if Clinton had appointed David Boies to the court? More to the point: I’m not sure the worries from the paranoid left are entirely misplaced. From all I hear, Miers was hardly unaware of the decision to torture detainees and certainly knows a huge amount about the decision by the White House to upend decades of clarity on the matter. Putting her on the court is one way of keeping her – and what she knows – beyond public scrutiny.
The Dish 