Why I wouldn't hire Bainbridge to be my lawyer

An ability to spot the critical issues and address them persuasively is paramount for a lawyer. In this attack on President Bush and his nomination of Harriet Miers, Professor Bainbridge tries a double switch and screws it up (to use a baseball analogy).

He says:

I think it's time for principled conservatives to give Bush and the rest of the GOP leadership a spanking for having deserted the principles for which we stand. If that costs the party seats in the short term, maybe that's the price we have to pay for teaching the party a valuable lesson.

How is nominating Miers an abandonment of conservative principles? He doesn't say. He merely says she is not as qualified as he would like. So -- unless he is implicitly equating his personal desires for Supreme Court justices with bedrock conservative principles we are left to wonder.

How does defeating the nomination of Miers advance the cause of conservatism? He doesn't say. Somehow we are supposed to believe that having the GOP Senate embarrass Bush on a judicial nomination will teach a lesson to the party leadership about deserting principles. The line of causation for this argument gets lost in a swamp of cloudy thinking never to emerge again. To me, a defeat of Miers seems far more likely to result in nothing more than a fractured party unable to accomplish anything.

And how cavalier he is about the chance of losing control of one or more branches of government! Defeating the Miers nomination is worth risking that?!

Wow.

Talk about out of control recklessness. I'm not the type to place my entire retirement savings on a number at the craps table in hopes of making a big score. And I damn sure wouldn't hire a lawyer who advised me to do so. Especially with such a shoddy rationalization for such extreme behavior.