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Don't miss Harold Meyerson's account of Andrew Card's talk on Harriet Miers and Article II of the Constitution last night at the Hudson Institute:
Wonder if everybody got the message....Among the various defenses of Miers advanced in recent days, Card's achieved new heights of peculiarity. Before a crowd that was dense with conservative intellectuals, Robert Bork among them, Card defended the nomination as a breakthrough for women. Miers, he said, "was breaking glass ceilings before most people realized glass ceilings were even there." ("People," in this formulation, probably doesn't include women themselves.) He testified to Miers' intellectualism by reminding listeners that Miers had majored in math ("something Herman Kahn would have liked") and has counseled the president on any number of challenges -- "and by the way, that includes constitutional challenges."
At which point Card himself turned constitutional scholar. As White House chief-of-staff, he found the most intriguing article, he said, to be Article II, which established the presidency and the executive branch. Miers, he continued, understood Article II as well, and would defend it "when challenged by those given the power to challenge it by Article I [i.e., the Congress] and Article III [i.e., the courts]."
Thus ended Card's constitutional disquisition -- not a moment too soon, as he had managed to conflate Miers' duties as White House counsel with what he seemed to be saying was her judicial philosophy on executive power. He could not have meant to imply that Miers would see her first duty on the bench as defending Bush against all enemies, legislative and judicial, but that's what he managed to convey. At minimum, he suggested that Miers would be the staunchest proponent of executive power over that of the other two branches that the Court had seen in a very long time...