President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, has withdrawn herself from nomination.

I can't tell you how good this makes me feel. Miers was in no way qualified to be a judge on the highest court in the land. She was barely qualified to be a judge on one of the nation's 13 second-highest courts.

Several factors helped to make Harriet Miers unlikeable by anyone. First, the hardcore neo-cons didn't like her. These people, which consist of half religious fanatics like James Dobson and half corporate executives, couldn't be sure how she would rule on the abortion issue if it were to come before her as a justice. After discovering than John Roberts wasn't as hard-right as they thought, the neo-cons wanted a nominee who they could be sure was 100% anti-abortion. And they wanted proof. Harriet Miers brought no proof of her opinions to the table, save apocryphal conversations with Dobson and Republican leaders in which she assured them that she was pro-life. But this wasn't good enough; the neo-cons want abortion illegalized now.

Second, the regular Republicans didn't like her because she was patently unqualified. Conservative columnist George Will wrote in Oct. 5's Washington Post, "Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists." Miers had no previous judicial experience and no experience working for the government. Her only governmental experience was that of White House Counsel, not a position in which she would have to deal with constitutional issues of national importance. (Contrast this with John Roberts' position as Deputy Solicitor General.) Miers spent twenty-some years as a private practice lawyer in Texas. In no way did she have the minimum qualifications to deal with constitutional issues of national importance.

Third, Democrats didn't like her because she was extremely close to the president. Since Bush became governor of Texas in 1994, Miers has been close to him. In 2001, he brought her to the White House in the position of White House Secretary. In 2005, when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General, Miers became White House Counsel. Democrats were rightly concerned with whether or not she would be objective in dealing with issues of executive power. If there were any cases dealing with torture or prisoner abuse or the War on Terr', she would probably have to recuse herself, since she was in on the policymaking behind these issues. And, as we found out earlier this week, any and all work she did as White House Counsel would not be given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, since it would be under executive privilege protection. So, whatever little we knew about her already, we would know even less.

Now the search is on for another (female) Supreme Court nominee. This is some retirement for Sandra Day O'Connor; she won't get to move to Florida until at least January, and by then all the tourists will have snagged the good parking spaces.

In other news

President Bush un-suspended the Davis-Bacon Act yesterday. The Davis-Bacon Act requires contractors performing work for the federal government to pay their employees the prevailing wage in the area (not the "union wage," as critics of Davis-Bacon often claim). A Wall Street Journal piece sent to me by Ned reinforces the old conservative talking points about Davis-Bacon: it's unnecessary, it's a holdover from the 1930s, it's racist, it's only good for unions, etc. The article is very small, so here it is, reprinted in full, from Ned's email to me:

George W. Bush compares favorably with his father when it comes to his commitment to free-market economics. But the elder President Bush at least had the good policy judgment to suspend an expensive and cumbersome law called the Davis-Bacon Act to facilitate reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 -- only to see President Clinton reinstate it as a pay-off to organized labor in one of his first acts in office.

Now, less than two months after doing the same in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this Bush White House has reversed itself on the issue. We're told yesterday's decision to reinstate Davis-Bacon in the affected Gulf states on November 8 came after a meeting last week between Chief of Staff Andrew Card and about 20 Republican Congressmen from union-heavy districts. The move can only increase the cost and slow the pace of reconstruction. And as an act of unprincipled political calculation it ranks right up there with the decision to impose tariffs on imported steel during Mr. Bush's first term.

Davis-Bacon is almost always cast as "worker-friendly" legislation that requires federally funded construction projects to pay the "prevailing" wage rate in a given area. But in reality the anti-competitive 1931 law is a relic of the Jim Crow era. New York Congressman Robert Bacon was upset about an Alabama contractor who had brought a largely black construction crew to build a federal hospital in his district. "Colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wage rates," complained the American Federation of Labor at the time. Many economists and minority leaders recognize that Davis-Bacon continues to be a cause of minority unemployment in the construction sector to this day. In addition to that ugly history, Davis-Bacon is known for creating mountains of paperwork and unnecessary compliance costs.

We know the White House is well aware of all these points, since it alluded to them when it suspended Davis-Bacon on September 8. So the sudden reversal now -- well before hurricane reconstruction is finished, and at a time when the administration should be using all means necessary to expedite it and lower the price tag -- is a special disappointment.

What about worker protection? Just as people loudly proclaim that we don't need affirmative action or feminism anymore -- ostensibly because racism and sexism have been eliminated -- so, too, do people proclaim that unions are obsolete. All they do is drive up the market-clearing wage, leading to a shortage of jobs, since firms will hire 5 employees at $10 an hour instead of 10 employees at $10 an hour. But the world is more than hard economics. Classical economics provides a model for looking at the world, but it is by no means a complete picture of the world. It fails to take into account the welfare of the workers; in this case, we have people from New Orleans trying to rebuild their lives, something they can't do when wages are ridiculously low. And in the latter case, wages are artificially ridiculously low, since firms can charge a very low price for labor, and since demand for labor after Hurricane Katrina is inelastic, workers will work at any price. Davis-Bacon equalizes the playing field, offsetting one counter to the market with another.