It's the Groupthink, Stupid. (Or It's the Stupid Groupthink)

Over at Mark Kleiman's blog, Steve Teles argues that if Bush had nominated someone like Michael McConnell or Michael Luttig, the Federalist Society and related movement conservatives who seek long term changes in legal culture would not be at odds with members of the Christian right and what Teles calls the "electoral wing" of the Republican Party-- those Republicans who just want to win elections and achieve particular policy results.

If Teles is correct, one wonders why Bush didn't try to appease both wings of the party, given that he had more than 50 votes in the Senate, and given that someone like Michael McConnell, at least, had a very good change of avoiding a democratic filibuster. Instead, Bush chose a stealth nominee, Harriet Miers, who now has exacerbated the conflict between the different parts of the Republican coalition. This suggests either

(1) Bush is extremely risk averse to a threat of a filibuster (unlikely, given his past behavior);

(2) Bush was told by members of the Gang of 14 that neither McConnell, Luttig, Wilkinson, or any other conservative with comparably excellent qualifications would be acceptable (highly unlikely);

(3) Bush was determined to nominate a woman, and the Gang of 14 had signalled that none of the women in the group of candidates with excellent credentials would be acceptable (unlikely but not out of the question);

(4)Simple hubris: Bush was being stubborn and engaging in a bit of cronyism, thinking that no one in the Senate would stand up to him; and his advisors, who were distracted and afraid to cross him, couldn't dissuade him from this selection (somewhat more likely).

If the answer is (4), or something like it, this suggests the importance of diversity of opinion and institutional checks on self-dealing and groupthink among decisionmakers. It is no accident, I think, that Harriet Miers was the result of a process led by Harriet Miers herself assisted by other close friends of the President. (Recall that Dick Cheney was the head of the Vice-Presidential search effort, and he ended up becoming Vice-President). Sometimes relying exclusively on trusted aides works, but in the long run it is a recipe for very bad results. The Bush Administration's mishandling of the Iraq war seems to me to be a case in point. (And my suspicion is that much of the responsibility for those bad results can be laid at the feet of Bush's selection for Vice-President.). Bush's selection of Miers already seems to have been a strategic mistake from the standpoint of the interests of his party; only in the long run will we know whether it was also a bad choice for the country.