I have been getting similar types of arguments from those who have taken issue with my oppostion to the nomination.

I have also gotten the whiff of anti-academics in some of the responses.

(BTW--the MSNBC link is broken)

Antitrust? Piece of cake. Tax Court? No biggie. Ah, but here's where the fork hits the grits: UCC prof (one of the truly annointeds!).

That is truly sad... it's a sad state of affairs when people have to resort to Any Rand. :)

I haven't heard support for Miers from any of my non-lawyer friends, and they generally are not a chardonnay crowd. But our government *is* by the people, ultimately, we have no one to blame but ourselves for what we get. If the people support blatant cronyism, they should let their senators know. If, on they other hand, they do not... they, too, should let their senator know.

That's Ayn Rand, btw. See, it's an effort just to type her name...

But wouldn't it be even worse to resort to just any Rand?

Maybe Bush could appoint the actress who played Rand on the original Star Trek. Come to think of it, there are no ex-Trek actors on the court. Where's the justice in that?

You don't have to become a crazy Ayn Rand-objectivist or anarch-capitalist to be in favor of meritocracy and reward based on worth.

While you are at it, maybe non-biologist creationists or IDers should be in charge of deciding what is and isn't better theory in science.

"Maybe the person who replaces Alan Greenspan shouldn't be an economist. Very few people in America have an Economics Ph.D..."

Well, Greenspan's "Ph.D." didn't involve actually writing a dissertation. If you have a positive assessment of Greenspan's tenure, this is a data point in favor of the underqualified!

It's all my fault.

I was told that if I voted for Kerry, then things would get worse for the USA. I did, and look what happened!

I'm not sure about "normal people," but I've written elsewhere that having a non-lawyer on the Court might not be such a bad thing. Whisper it among some and you'll get gasps about Dagby Taggart, but other countries routinely nominate non-lawyers to their constitutional courts. Not only don't the heavens fall, but these jurists are often quite well-regarded.

The question with Miers isn't really one of meritocracy as such: no one's arguing that we ought to pick for the Court randomly out of the phone book. Rather, those of us on the other side are questioning whether the indicia of merit that Miers lacks are really necessary indicators.