Who Is Harriet Miers?

The official answer we hear is "we don't know" - from both sides of the aisle in the Senate - to the concern, really, of everyone.  Even George Will is now openly concerned about the Miers appointment to the point of opposition:
It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

So - who will Harriet Miers be?

Will she be pro-choice?  Maybe, maybe not.  That's the essence of the tooth-gnashing going on at the moment, but we do know one thing about Miers:  she is a Bush loyalist, Texas Republican who will rule consistently in favor of whatever business interest rules the day:
And what, exactly, does business want? Overturning the New Deal? The Constitution in Exile? The return of God to the public schools? The end of affirmative action? Outlawing abortion once and for all? Squashing gays and lesbians underfoot? None of these things. What business wants is stability, comfort, predictability, and an agile, productive, submissive and demobilized population. It wants a powerful executive that can protect America's interests abroad. It wants a Congress freed from federal judicial oversight that is able to dish out the pork, jiggle the tax code and deregulate the economy according to its ever shifting concerns and interests. And it wants a Supreme Court that will give a pro-business President and a pro-business Congress a free hand, a Court that will protect the rights of employers over employees, advertisers over consumer groups, and corporations over environmentalists.

It wants, in short, someone very much like Harriet Miers.

The interests that promote people like Harriet Miers to such positions are not the social interests - they're the interests of the  Wal-Marters that are for the dissolution of government oversight, workplace safety regulation and union organization.

In other words, "a typical big business Republican".

Tom Frank is right again.