Miers: Flyer, you may be right about this being a bad pick. My fear is that an untested conservative jurist is a liberal jurist in the making. However, as to the politics of the pick, this article indicates that she might be an up-front compromise candidate:

Democratic and Republican special interests groups had been braced for a political brawl over the pick, but they may not get it. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had urged the president to consider Miers, according to several officials familiar with Bush's consultations with Congress.

I'm guessing she's comfortably moderate, perhaps quietly pro-choice. Something like that. It's possible that Bush looked at the Democrats (bristling because they had no real way to Bork Roberts, now spoiling for a real fight) and lost his nerve. He doesn't have a whole lot of political capital right now, you may have noticed. I heard a lot of right-leaning comment to the effect that Bush should now try to "ram through" an ideological nominee, perhaps even one of those that the Dems have already filibustered at lower court posts. That's the dumb move. If Bush were still riding a first-term, post-9/11 patriotic surge, he could nominate Lemmy and make it stick. Right now, though, he has to choose people who can at least pretend to be moderates.

Miers might turn out to be a solid conservative, but who the hell knows. Right now she's just a brain for hire. Until these bastards actually get on the bench, you can't which ones will be able to handle the power and which ones will use it to advance an agenda.

In the end, I'm actually pleased. Bush will end up, I think, having to pick right-of-center law geeks (like Roberts, perhaps Miers) over fire-breathing Jesus geeks. He'll appease the base as much as he can, so we can be fairly sure that another Souter is not in the offing. So we end up with judges who are politically (perhaps methodologically) conservative, but socially more moderate. It ain't the same thing as libertarian, but it might be as close as we get.