WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Harriet Miers, conservatives who balked at her lack of conservative credentials were assured by some that they should infer Miers’s conservatism from the president’s confidence in her. The skeptics generally responded with the maxim “trust but verify,” and suggested that Bush, a non-lawyer, might not be able to discern the absence of a strong conservative judicial philosophy.

Some (most notably the lawyer and blogger Patrick Frey) went so far as to question whether Bush himself holds a strong conservative philosophy when it comes to domestic issues. Much of the president’s domestic policy suggests that he is a pragmatist who, though possessing some conservative instincts, tends to put results ahead of conservative principles: Rarely are conservative principles absent from the president’s domestic policy, but often they take a back-seat to short-term problem-solving.