Manuel Miranda Quotations

She is not one of the score of brilliant and tested ... potential nominees that the president might have nominated.

One of the great ironies of this nomination is that it requires the White House machine to stop and spin in the opposite direction than they did in Roberts.

I think the president is going to have to nominate a woman or Hispanic or an African American, and that probably the situation (with Hurricane Katrina) is such that an elevation makes good sense now.

Right now the base is completely fractured and people are very concerned about the impact on the 2006 elections. The troubling thing is that the Supreme Court was the gold ring and the president's thinking appears indiscernible, unless you're willing to take it as a matter of faith.

Roberts has soaked up the white male seat.

will rightly think that she is certainly unqualified.

The reaction of many conservatives today will be that the president has made possibly the most unqualified choice since Abe Fortas who had been the president's lawyer. The nomination of a nominee with no judicial record is a significant failure for the advisers that the White House gathered around it. However, the president deserves the benefit of a doubt, the nominee deserves the benefit of hearings, and every nominee deserves an up or down vote.

We come to this country to work; we are not here to hurt anybody.

We are entitled to a great national debate, ... and we shouldn't shy away from it.

The president really defeated the ogre of stealth nominations. This is a great accomplishment for the presidency.

At the end of the day, the bulk of us are with the president and with the leadership, but that's because we don't have any other place to go. We suppose they're doing the best they can, but we're all very unhappy.

Conservatives want someone with a clear, written record. The Roberts hearing has been superb as a technical, tactical matter, but it's left some people in despair and just clamoring for someone with a written record. The left keeps asking, 'What does the right know that we don't know?' Well the truth of the matter is, we don't know anything. We're all being asked to take a leap of faith.

These counsels are people who are not only people of high intellect, they have forgone much higher paying jobs to work in public service.

Delay always harms a nominee. That's the No. 1 rule of nominations, but what they could do in a week when most people are on recess, I'm not so sure.

The calls to withdraw are serious, and they're going to increase. The more that we heard from the nomination's defenders, the more people became convinced that there was no substance in the nomination and that her friends were her worst enemies.

The calls to withdraw are serious, and they're going to increase, ... The more that we heard from the nomination's defenders, the more people became convinced that there was no substance in the nomination and that her friends were her worst enemies.

The nomination of a nominee with no judicial record is a significant failure for the advisers that the White House gathered around it. However, the president deserves the benefit of a doubt, the nominee deserves the benefit of hearings, and every nominee deserves an up-or-down vote.

If he did that, he would reduce the numbers of the people who continue to support him.

And I think there are folks in the White House ready to receive that pitch,