Francisco

One could hope Miers is more of a moderate than Bush might have wanted. But if that's not the case already, don't expect any change in that direction any time soon, and here's why I think there won't be, and why Bush may be justified in feeling there won't be - and why Miers will remain his advocate for the forseeable future.

In my view, the style of reasoning used by an advocate in our adversarial system, often referred to as sophistry, is necessarily different from the style expected to be used by a judge, who theoretically extracts from the opposing positions something closer to the truth and hopefully to justice as it relates to the matter in question.

The further judges get from their days as advocates, the more objective they tend to become, and are required to become, and their tolerance for sophistry tends to decline accordingly. The same changes apply the further the judge is removed from political influences, where sophistry is also the name of the game.

So Miers, who will have been an advocate AND a political partisan up to the very moment of her expected appointment to the Court, can be expected to retain the advocate's reasoning style much longer than would otherwise have been the case.
And while most appointees have found themselves relatively freed from political obligations once they are on the Court, this would not necessarily be the case with Miers.

With some exceptions (Thomas comes to mind), other appointees have reached the Court largely because of a track record as a judge, even if that record itself reflected some political bias, but Miers would have earned her new position almost wholly because of partisanship, with no record of judicial accomplishment that would otherwise mitigate any obligation to fulfill the terms under which she will have been granted that appointment. Any shift to the middle could then be a long time coming.