Below The Beltway

As I noted yesterday, a columnist in the Washington Post suggested that Barack Obama should offer a Supreme Court seat to Hillary Clinton as a way of convincing her to leave the Presidential race.

Well, it seems I wasn’t the only one who thought it was a bad idea.

Ann Althouse was positively apoplectic:

Now, why did WaPo publish this? Miller was a special assistant to Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. and he has a book about the Senate, but he sounds like a complete fool here. His notion that Hillary Clinton belongs on the Supreme Court is just: Everybody seems to think she’s pretty smart. And it doesn’t even matter that she has no judicial experience and has never done anything to indicate that she is any sort of a legal scholar or has anything like a judicial temperament.

Not only that, following Miller’s advice would, she argues, turn the Supreme Court into another partronage job:

Miller thrills at the prospect of law as a raw political battle. Democrats who respect the rule of law and want rights to be taken seriously should not cheer at that spectacle. And conservatives will once again get strong traction arguing — as McCain did the other day — that their judges are the ones who are faithfully subservient to the law. I know liberals don’t believe that, but they must present themselves as wanting judges who bring legitimate interpretative skill and diligence to their task and operate independently from politics. Or all is lost.

James Joyner, while calmer than Althouse, agrees that Miller’s idea is pretty silly:

There’s no way Obama appoints Clinton to the Supreme Court. For one thing, she’s too old. She’d be at least 61 and presidents want someone who’ll be on the Court 20-30 years. Further, why would he award such a prize to someone who has given him so much grief? He’s certain to be the nominee at this point. Sure, presidents have given the VP nod to bitter rivals. But the vice presidency is a subordinate position, not an independent power base.

And Jazz Shaw at The Moderate Voice says this:

There have been dark eras in our country’s judicial history when presidents have used the Supreme Court as a sort of dumping ground for troublesome political rivals, absent any previous experience or qualificaitons for the job. One would hope, however, that those days are long since past. The words written by our SCOTUS justices will echo through the ages and be used as a basis for decisions coming generations from now. Those seats are not a suitable answer to provide a politically expedient solution to thorny intra-party squabbles.

Fortunately, this seems to be little more than the fantasy of one former Senate staffer who managed to get column space in the Post. In the real world, Obama doesn’t strike me as a person dumb enough to give someone like Hillary a job that actually matters.