Who Bush Should Nominate

Now that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court, President Bush has an opportunity to nominate a well-qualified candidate with strong conservative judicial credentials. I believe Miss Miers has done the President, the party, and the country a huge favor by seeing the immense difficulty that would have surrounded the confirmation process had she not withdrawn.

Now that we have a vacancy to fill, the choice is obvious. The President's supporters overwhelmingly agree he should nominate Judge Janice Rogers Brown to the Supreme Court. She is a well-established, battle-tested judicial conservative who has spent almost a decade on the bench--mostly on the California Supreme Court, to which she was reelected with 76% of the vote.

If not Judge Brown, the next best choices for the nomination would be Judge Karen Williams of the 4th Circuit, Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit, Judge Michael Luttig of the 4th Circuit, Judge Priscilla Owen of the 5th Circuit, Judge Samuel Alito of the 3rd Circuit, Judge Emilio Garza of the 5th Circuit, and Judge Michael McConnell of the 10th Circuit.

The confirmation of a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gives us a rare opportunity to shift the direction of the federal judiciary. This fight is about returning the courts to a position of interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and respecting the Article V amendment process and prerogatives of the democratically elected branches of government by not using creative legal theories to impose justices' personal policy preferences upon the country under the guise of interpreting the Constitution.