It's Been Real, Harriet

The news channels are reporting that Bush has "reluctantly" accepted Harriet Miers' request to withdraw her nomination. Looks like they're using as cover the combination of the White House's refusal to hand over internal documents and the (frankly rather serious) issue of how often Miers would have to recuse herself from hearing cases about policy she'd had a hand in forming. Which may be a sign that, unlike Trent Lott, the White House does read blogs, since that's more or less the exit strategy the conservative blogs have been pitching. Seeya H.

Addendum: The narrative emerging seems to be that this was, above all, about Miers' failure to meet the right's litmus tests—in particular, uncertainty about whether she'd overturn Roe. But that just doesn't make sense in a lot of ways. For one, the widely loved (on the right) Roberts doesn't seem to have been any more of a sure thing on that front—certainly not after he described Roe as a "settled precedent" that is "entitled to respect." Is it that hard to buy that this really was, at least in significant part, about her thin resumé? Heaven forfend we should concede that not everything is explicable through the lens of horse-race outcome-oriented politics, that some people actually have a principled commitment to a competent Court.