Start over.(THE SUPREME COURT)(nominating Harriet Miers for Supreme Court justice)

WHEN President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, we called it a missed opportunity. The ensuing debate has confirmed that judgment. For all the debate's fury, a consensus was reached early on that point. Leaving aside the president and his employees, even Miers's fiercest defenders allow that she was not their top pick-or even their tenth.

There is very little evidence that Miers is a judicial conservative, and there are some warnings that she is not. Miers is said rarely to have raised her voice in the Bush administration's internal policy debates, but it is known that she was a strong defender of racial preferences when they were being challenged before the Supreme Court. In the end, her influence helped sway the Bush administration to file a brief defending those preferences, which, in turn, helped sway the Court to uphold them.

Miers's own career as a lawyer shows a strong tendency to identify with local elites and establishments, to go along with prevailing ideas, and to avoid doing anything that might cause unpleasantness or rock the boat. These are useful personality traits, but they are not the traits of a Scalia or a Thomas--the kind of justice this president pledged to appoint.

Miers's record on the Dallas City Council has been described as that of someone who was neither liberal nor conservative. She rose at the American Bar Association, an organization deeply hostile to conservatives. At the White House she showed herself intensely protective of the ABA, opposing efforts to end its privileged role vetting judges--a privilege that the ABA had used to promote liberal judges and downgrade conservative ones. She donated money to the Al Gore campaign when her colleagues asked her to, and helped establish a lecture series at Southern Methodist University that brought feminist icons like Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi to campus. She made a point of refusing any affiliation with the Federalist Society.

Miers's supporters argue that her conservatism is reflected in the judicial picking she allegedly did for President Bush. Most of this work was, however, done before she became counsel. They say that she is pro-life. (Her campaign to get the ABAto stay neutral on abortion, among other indicators, lends some credence to that avowal, and qualifies, but does not erase, the impression that she flees controversy.) They say that she has a strong evangelical faith. But neither being pro-life nor being an evangelical is a reliable guide to what kind of jurisprudence she would produce, even on Roe, let alone on other issues. Indeed, the fact that her supporters have had to resort to such weak defenses--and, worse, to pleasant generalities about her kindness to her colleagues, and to charges of sexism on the part of her critics--is perhaps the most distressing evidence that no stronger arguments are available in behalf of this nomination.

We are left with only stray clues to Miers's value system. Unlike John Roberts, or for that matter Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, or Clarence Thomas, Miers comes to the highest Court in the land as a practically unknown quantity, a gamble for incredibly high stakes.

Then there is the ...