WRITING IN the Wall Street Journal, editorial board member Melanie Kirkpatrick counsels her "friends on the right" to "brew themselves a cup of chamomile tea and go back and review the roster of Bush judges." Such an exercise may help them "sleep better" with the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. "Any president is due some deference under the Constitution in his choice of judges," Kirkpatrick says, "and given his record on picking judges, this president deserves more than he has received."

In other words, trust Bush--or at least wait until the Senate hearings before passing judgment on Harriet Miers. For over two weeks now we've heard White House aides and pro-Miers conservatives parrot some variation of this argument. A charitable interpretation might be paraphrased as follows: Just be patient--when Miers goes before committee, she'll dazzle everyone with her punctilious mastery of constitutional law. A not-so-charitable interpretation might go like this: As long as she votes our way on the Court, what more do you want? So let's quit all this elitist nonsense about "qualifications" and "cronyism" and give her a chance.

If the pro-Miers forces mean to imply the former, then yes, they are correct to say the president deserves at least a modicum of deference in his selection. But if they mean the latter--that how Miers will vote is all that matters, and her credentials be damned--then conservatives should be aghast.

Republicans have spent much of the past quarter century establishing themselves as the Meritocracy Party: the party that rejects

A conservative president--whose broader agenda most Republicans still favor--has tapped a patently under-qualified candidate. But the White House insists she will adjudicate as a strict constructionist, not unlike Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and the newly-minted (though still untested) chief justice, John Roberts. The administration also touts her evangelical Protestantism, a not-so-subtle assurance to pro-lifers. Meanwhile, First Lady Laura Bush and White House adviser Ed Gillespie have suggested that opposition to the nominee might be a function of sexism.

It is useful to construct a hypothetical here. Imagine a Democratic president, one with fairly solid street-cred among his party's base. Imagine he stated his intent to nudge the Court in a more liberal direction. Imagine he had once named John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his favorite justices, the models for his own picks. Imagine, then, that this president chose his own White House counsel for the Court, a woman with no record of constitutional jurisprudence. Imagine that, to appease pro-choicers who were skeptical of how she'd vote on Roe v. Wade, the president mentioned that his nominee was a Jewish woman like Justice Ginsburg (wink-wink). Imagine, finally, that the first lady and a top White House staffer painted her opponents as sexists.