SCOTUS Update

Monday will be der Tag--Bush is widely expected to announce his pick for the "Harriet O'Connor" seat. Hugh Hewitt in the Times and Rick Moran in American Thinker seem stuck on hand wringing; SC&A was worried last week (today, that blog crashes my IE). Beldar's adopted radio silence. Lefties will chortle--but that doesn't prove they're right.

Quoting the WaPo, Patterico has the best take:

It’s getting harder and harder to argue that the campaign to boot Harriet Miers was a bad thing. Just look at a Washington Post story today titled Appellate Judges Cited as Focus of New Search:

The administration has backed away from any insistence that the nominee be a woman or a minority. Rather, it is focused on potential nominees who have previously won Senate confirmation, whose intellectual qualifications would be unquestioned and who have paper trails that make clear their conservative credentials, said one source who is close to the nomination process.

Those candidates, according to the sources, include several federal appellate judges, among them: Samuel A. Alito Jr., J. Michael Luttig, Michael W. McConnell, Emilio M. Garza, Priscilla R. Owen and Edith H. Jones.

Every last one of them would be a good pick, and I’d term almost all of them “fantastic.” How different this short list sounds from the last time! This time, it’s all people who should be considered.

Other names mooted include Chris Cox, Janice Rogers Brown, Alice Batchelder and Maureen Mahoney. Glenn Reynolds sees "a Kozinski boomlet!," which is no less far-fetched than some names on John Hawkins poll of the blogosphere's best and worst picks. Like he said: any of them would top "Harriet O'Connor."