Senator Sessions, that's just how WE feel!

Senator Jeff Sessions (R–AL), cornered by a New York Times [free registration required] reporter with questions about the Harriet Miers nomination, "struggled for words, then pushed a button for a nearby elevator in the Capitol building and told an aide, 'Get me out of here.'"

That's just about how the rest of us feel, too. We have an incompetent President who defends his incompetent FEMA chief and all the incompetent people who did the incompetent planning for the Iraq war and then nominates an unqualified crony for the Supreme Court, and yet the issues still seem to be "character," "loyalty," and religious beliefs.

What about COMPETENCE?

Why on earth should anyone believe that Harriet Miers is competent to decide fundamental questions of constitutional law? Would you appoint a family doctor as your chief of neonatal neurosurgery? Sure, he has a medical degree, but that doesn't mean that he knows the least thing about surgery, much less a very specific subfield of surgery.

I'm not saying that a Supreme Court justice needs to have gone to (or better yet, taught at) Harvard Law, or served for fifty years in the federal appellate courts, or written millions of pages of law journal articles unraveling the intricacies and ambiguities of the Constitution, but I am saying that those are examples of things that make someone better qualified than Harriet Miers to sit on the Supreme Court. She went to a respectable law school and practiced law for many years, but she is no more qualified to be a Supreme Court justice than to be head of FEMA.