The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.

There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging...

But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials—debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like—the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges.

By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges.

Imagine a Democratic president, one with fairly solid street-cred among his party's base. Imagine he stated his intent to nudge the Court in a more liberal direction. Imagine he had once named John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his favorite justices, the models for his own picks. Imagine, then, that this president chose his own White House counsel for the Court, a woman with no record of constitutional jurisprudence. Imagine that, to appease pro-choicers who were skeptical of how she'd vote on Roe v. Wade, the president mentioned that his nominee was a Jewish woman like Justice Ginsburg (wink-wink). Imagine, finally, that the first lady and a top White House staffer painted her opponents as sexists.

How would Republicans react? They'd fly into high dudgeon. They'd condemn the cynical use of religion. They'd blast the nomination of a White House insider with no ostensible background in studying the constitution. They'd lament the triumph of cronyism and blind partisanship over merit and intellectualism. They'd thump their chests and affirm that Republicans, not Democrats, were the Meritocracy Party—as witness the High Court hullabaloo. And, on each count, they'd be convincing.