Chastening the court.(on the right)(nominating Ms. Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court)

LO, from moderate left field (I write of Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times op-ed page) comes a voice of concern over the Supreme Court's elevation, over the past 40 years, to moral tribune of America.

What brought this on, of course, was the frenzy of exploration when President Bush named Ms. Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. It was almost immediately plain that he had not named Phyllis Schlafly to the Court. An immediate inspection of Ms. Miers's spoor reveals not very much about ideological inclinations--indeed, she confuses the whole picture by having once upon a time contributed money to a campaign of Al Gore's. Beyond a punctilious affirmation of a challenge to the broadest interpretation of Roe v. Wade in her early years, there was nothing to engender ideological fright.

An interesting feature of her selection was the comment by Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, that it's not a bad idea to name to the Supreme Court every now and then candidates who have never sullied their fingers in the judiciary, as Harriet Miers has not. The reasoning here is that if you come in from, say, the court of appeals, you may be frozen in your views on certain judicial questions and prove less than amenable to reform. An interesting thought, though interesting mostly because it was Leahy who had the thought, and he is a prominent Democrat, probably influential in the weeks ahead when Ms. Miers is questioned.

More interesting was the featured closeness of Ms. Miers to the president. Unquestionably, before the grilling of her is done, the objection will be raised by somebody that her closeness to the president argues a filial relationship that undermines independent judgment. The point could be stressed that someone who has worked intimately with her/his patron for years and regards him as a fount of wisdom and right thinking would run the possibility of intellectual subjection.

Ms. Miers will need to shore up her thinking on how to handle the relevance of her closeness to Mr. Bush. If he had not brought the matter up in the first place, she could more easily ...