The biggest problem Harriet Miers had was she was not a big enough of a nut job for the radical right. Even Ann Coulter herself stated that the last thing they wanted was a jurist who would apply common sense to their rulings. There is no doubt that President Bush could have found someone more intellectually qualified than Miers, but lets not kid ourselves here, Harriet Miers mediocre intellectual qualifications are not why the radical right did not support her. After all, they had no problem with Clarence Thomas and no legal scholar in the nation would argue that he is the sharpest stick on court. The fact is, the radical and socially conservative right wants nothing less than a total nut job to replace O’Connor. O’Connor was a non-ideological slightly right of center moderate who probably represented the views of the vast majority of Americans. That is not the kind of jurist the radical right wants. They want someone to legislate from the far right from the bench. For all of their talk of judicial activism, the fact is, the fact is the biggest judicial activist on the court right now is Scalia and they see him as the model jurist.
The Republicans have a majority in both Houses of Congress and they have the Whitehouse. Yet, they have passed no bills to allow school sanctioned prayer in public schools, ban same sex marriage, eradicate federal wild land protections, or to severely restrict abortions. The fact is, they never will because they know that they would never get it past the public. So they want an activist judge to do it for them and they were worried that since Miers had not spent her entire adult life kneeling at the alter of extreme right wing activism and fundamentalism that she might not turn out to be the activist that they want.