Will conservative chickens come home to roost?

President Bush's next Supreme Court nominee- reportedly either Judge Samuel Alito of New Jersey or Judge J. Michael Luttig of Virginia- may well end up paying the price for the tactics used by conservative critics of Harriet Miers.

One can only hope that those tactics don't end up having the ironic result of preventing the confirmation of a nominee with better credentials than Miers both as a conservative and as a legal scholar. After all, some of the issues- specifically, religion and judicial philosophy- which Republicans successfully argued could not legitimately be raised against Chief Justice John Roberts were the very arguments Miers' conservative critics raised against her.

How, at this point, do you tell the Democrats they can't raise those issues against the new nominee?