With Miers out, what's Plan B?

President Bush is getting a "do-over" on his latest Supreme Court pick.

White House counsel Harriet Miers's decision to withdraw her nomination electrified Washington Thursday morning, momentarily diverting attention from the intense speculation over possible looming indictments of White House officials in the CIA leak case.

The news ignited a burst of speculation: Whom would Mr. Bush nominate next to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor? And would his next choice trigger the kind of battle royale with Democrats over the future of the court that many activists on both the left and the right seem to crave?

Since nearly the moment Ms. Miers was named on Oct. 3, her nomination was in trouble. As a longtime Bush associate with a slim résumé on constitutional issues, she was tagged a "crony."

Elite conservatives opined that Miers could not be counted on to decide cases as a true conservative.

Key was the fact that she was to replace Justice O'Connor, the court's critical swing vote on divisive social issues, such as abortion and affirmative action. In short, social conservatives felt that Bush had missed the opportunity of a generation to reshape the court.

The White House blamed senators' attitude toward her status as a presidential adviser - and thus the unwillingness to release documents related to her duties - for her nomination's demise.

"She recognized that the process was headed toward an unresolvable impasse," press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters. "Much of her constitutional experience is confidential and protected from disclosure by the executive branch," he added later. Senators, he said, had made it clear she would have to cross a line in revealing information, and she could not do that. Senate confirmation hearings were to begin Nov. 7.

But the fierce opposition from some of Bush's usually loyal conservative supporters - opening up a rare fissure in the Republican coalition - was just as central to Miers's withdrawal, analysts say.

"It was the intellectual elite of the conservative movement that expressed the most concern, not the religious conservatives or the business conservatives," says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, in Virginia.

"It may give them more power to dictate the next nominee. Do they get a veto? Or does it mean you do a better sell job, like they did on Roberts," he adds, referring to the new chief justice, John Roberts. "But [the selling of Roberts] took them a year."

Money may have also been a factor in Miers's fall. As senators grew increasingly dubious over her qualifications, outside groups that had formed to support Bush's judicial nominations found the financial pipeline had slowed to a trickle.

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