Two thoughts on the Miers nomination

The flailing about of certain conservatives in order to defend the Miers nomination, or at least to mitigate the offense of it, is instructive (but not edifying!). Two thoughts that have occurred to me that I haven't seen or heard elsewhere.

(1) Some conservatives have argued that since Miers is the one who has been vetting all those wonderful judicial nominees the President has been sending up, she must herself be the right sort of person for the job. But isn't that like assuming that a corporate headhunter would himself make a great CEO?

(2) Other conservatives have tried to take comfort in the fact that she was opposed to repeal of the Texas sodomy law, a stance that suggests a general social conservatism even broader than her (presumed) opposition to abortion. This one just makes me apoplectic. For one thing (and this point has been made by many folks), on the "umpire" theory of adjudication that these conservatives claim to support, knowing Miers's policy views tells us absolutely nothing about how she would decide cases. We don't want to replace liberal bench-legislators with conservative bench-legislators; we want to be rid of the imperial judiciary altogether. But more important (and this is the bit that I haven't seen anyone comment on), I should have thought that the conservative position was that sodomy laws are stupid and unwarrantable exercises of state power, and so ought to be repealed by legislators, but would have to be allowed by judges, since obviously the Constitution doesn't contain a right to sodomy. That's certainly my view -- I don't want sodomy laws on the books, for the obvious reason, but lots of quite boneheaded laws are perfectly constitutional. It also happened to be the view of Justice Thomas in his pithy dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. And I don't see how it is a recommendation of Miers's bona fides as a conservative jurist that she supported a law that Clarence Thomas thinks is obviously ridiculous.