Miers and Realignment

If Harriet Miers is successfully confirmed by the Senate, a coalition of economic liberals and religious conservatives (reflecting Bush's actual ideology more than the present Republican coalition does) will have made it possible. Memo to my fellow economic conservatives: Now is the time to hunt for new allies. You are being left in the lurch by the religious conservatives, led by the President himself.

Via Instapundit, I have learned that, as I have suspected, Harriet Miers may well be my diametric opposite politically. The Corner quotes the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary:

[B]usiness may not be getting quite what the White House packagers are touting. . . . One White House source says the positions she took in staff meetings might surprise her business supporters. He said she leaned conservative on social questions and liberal on economic issues [bold added]. Bruce Packard, a former partner at Ms. Miers' law firm, also cautions that she may be more complicated than people expect. "She is very reticent to ever discuss her own views and liberal on issues other than abortion," he told me.

If Harriet Miers gets confirmed, it may represent the beginning of a social conservative/leftist alliance reminiscent of the Sojourners. And, if economic conservatives have any sense, they will look for other allies. As I once wrote in one of my snarkier moods:

Here's how [the fiscal conservative/social conservative alliance] shakes out in practice. The Christians are cheesed because Bush isn't moving fast enough to outlaw abortion. This means that those uppity secularist conservatives are starting to be more trouble than they're worth. In the meantime, some credible version of Hillary Clinton is starting to sound like she might lend her ear to this part of the religious agenda, if only she gets more of her economic agenda. Well, the religious conservatives don't really give a hoot in hell for capitalism (That would be why they're not called "fiscal" conservatives ....) so they might very well ditch the fiscal conservatives to get a bigger piece of what they want.

Of course, if what they're saying about Miers is true, and I see no reason to doubt it, the thing I goofed up was in not thinking that Bush himself might ditch the fiscal conservatives. The signs have been there even since before Katrina. Bush is a big government conservative at heart. He also has no bid for reelection to lose if he fractures the Republican base, and an increasingly hawkish- and religious sounding Hillary Clinton (with Newt Gingrich egging her on) waits in the wings. She is no shoe-in, but if Bush successfully cobbles together a liberal-religious right coalition to confirm Miers, the writing is on the wall for the Republican Party as we know it.

Alternate theory: Bush wants to head off a possible wooing of social conservative voters by Hillary Clinton in the next election. Big deal. The end result is the same: the fiscal conservatives -- and individual rights -- are hung out to dry.

The Harriet Miers nomination seems to portend more ill every time I think about it. The silver lining is that this will make the Republican split happen sooner rather than later, an ultimately good thing, however painful it will be.

-- CAV