Friday, October 28, 2005 12:30 P.M. EDT

Best of the Web is off today. In its place, we offer a free sample of Political Diary, the editorial page's daily, subscription e-mail newsletter on American politics (subscribe here). James Taranto returns Monday.

• Chris Cox Is the Un-Miers
• GOP Stoops to Bash 'Big Oil'
• Condi, Foreign and Domestic
• Movement Conservatives vs. Bush Conservatives (Quote of the Day)
• Book 'Em, Dano
• Tax Reform Lite

When the nomination of Harriet Miers was at its most beleaguered, one political commentator suggested the president should appoint Chris Cox, the newly installed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Supreme Court and name Ms. Miers, a skilled corporate litigator, to the SEC. Now that she has withdrawn, Ms. Miers seems determined to resume her duties as White House counsel. A perch on the SEC might not interest her, but the idea of putting Mr. Cox, a former California congressman and deputy White House counsel in the Reagan years, still holds a lot of appeal.

Mr. Cox would have several advantages. As a former member of the House leadership, he personally knows more than half of the Senators and has impressed many with his temperament and judgment. Only this past summer, Mr. Cox was fully vetted and won unanimous confirmation by the Senate to the SEC post. His experience in the business world as a corporate litigator would add invaluable perspective to a high court largely staffed with former federal appeals court judges. He also has experience with the many terrorism cases that will come before the court: He was the founding chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

As for confirmability, it's true that California Senator Barbara Boxer threatened to veto his nomination to a federal appeals court four years ago. But for the Supreme Court, no individual Senator can exercise such a veto and there is a good chance that Ms. Boxer's more moderate colleague, Dianne Feinstein, would back Mr. Cox. While his views are well known, the Harvard Law School graduate is clearly no ideological hothead and his calm and reasoned approach to the law has won admirers across the political spectrum.

What's most worrisome is how quickly the Republican leadership in Congress exhibits signs of panic. Mid-term elections are a year away, and yet this week's announcements of record profits by some oil companies are causing GOP leaders to stampede into panic over high gas prices.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called for Senate hearings in which the heads of the nation's major oil companies would be called to justify the fact they are making money. I had thought such a scene--common during the 1970s government-induced energy crisis--wouldn't return in a GOP Congress. But political expediency seems to trump principle and common sense if the price at the pump goes high enough.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert went even further than Mr. Frist when he urged U.S. oil companies to invest in building more refineries. He noted, correctly, that it has been 30 years since a new refinery was built in the U.S., but that has far more to do with environmental objections than it does energy company stinginess. Indeed, oil companies have invested billions to make dramatic improvements and expand capacity at existing facilities. Total refining capacity has increased 10% in the past decade--the equivalent of building seven to eight new refineries.

Energy analyst Daniel Yergin says that if GOP Congressional leaders really want oil companies to invest in energy infrastructure here at home, they would do far better by trying to ease restrictions on energy exploration. "We do also have a lot of resources that are closed off, for instance, off the east coast," he told TechCentralStation.com. "I mean, it is a strange situation. We can drill off the Gulf Coast but not off the East Coast and yet there may be very extensive resources as well."

Polls show that some two out of three Americans believe that high energy prices are caused in part by the greed of oil companies. But such attitudes have been consistently present in the body politic for decades, and it is the job of political leaders not to pander but instead act to solve real problems. Jawboning energy companies and hauling their executives before Congress may make for temporary headlines, but in the long-run Messrs. Frist and Hastert would do better politically to focus on ways to increase domestic production. Cheap stunts will do the GOP little good in next year's elections if they haven't addressed the real causes of today's energy squeeze.

While in Canada this week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice showed a flash of her wit that would help make her a sensation on the campaign trail. When asked about billions of dollars Canada wants to recoup from tariffs imposed by the U.S. on Canadian lumber, Ms. Rice shot back: "I don't travel with that kind of money."

Later she deflected more criticism with a wry smile when Canadian Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew remarked: "It's a tough lobby. You have my sympathies, Condi."

Last week she also took a trip to Birmingham, Alabama, and visited a church that white supremacists bombed in 1963, killing four black girls, including Condi's friend Denise McNair. Ms. Rice met with McNair's father, who produced a picture of Ms. Rice's father at young Denise's kindergarten graduation. At a ceremony unveiling bronze plaques featuring the likenesses of the four murdered girls, Ms. Rice drew parallels to terrorist bombings today and the price some in Iraq are paying in the struggle for freedom.

It's not a coincidence that liberal columnists Richard Holbrooke and Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post and Maureen Dowd in the New York Times picked this week to criticize Ms. Rice. Meanwhile, Condi supporters are multiplying. Several groups are trying to draft her to run in 2008. Dick Morris has a new book out called "Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race," which he says is aimed at building grassroots support for Ms. Rice to run. Polls show her competitive with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in Iowa. Ms. Rice says she's made no plans to run for president--but then so does Hillary. She'd also bring continuity with the one Bush policy--the war--that the next Republican candidate will surely have to run on.

"The withdrawal of Harriet Miers is a defeat for George W. Bush, but it is a victory for the conservative movement. As we now see, there's a big distinction between the two... The movement knows that W. will be out of office in barely more than three years, while Miers might have been on the court for decades. And the conservative movement, like all ideological movements, sees itself as eternal. So the movement, if it is to be worth anything, has no choice but to fight for what it believes--even against a Republican White House"--columnist James Pinkerton writing in Newsday.

Bill Clinton is justifiably proud of his new presidential library in Little Rock. He touts high attendance figures for the library's exhibits on his two terms in office, though some dispute the accuracy of his numbers. But this week the library received two visitors Mr. Clinton might wish had stayed home. Juanita Broddrick and Kathleen Willey, two women who claim that Mr. Clinton physically abused them, toured the library to bring attention to a new book called "Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine." The list, which summons up memories of a truly bizarre era in American politics, is a long one: It includes Ms. Broddrick, Ms. Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Sally Perdue and Elizabeth Ward Gracen (a former Miss America).

In an article in FrontPageMagazine.com, Ms. Broddrick and Mr. Willey say their in-your-face tour of the Clinton library "is not a political vendetta on our part. The two of us assaulted by Bill Clinton were political supporters" until the incidents the women detail in the article. The women note that while Mr. Clinton's allies have described their stories as preposterous, when it comes to Bill and Hillary Clinton, "they have never even bothered to present any reasons why you should believe their denials and evasions regarding our accusations."

The women were accompanied by Candice Jackson, the book's author, and the trip was paid for by World Ahead Publishing. Not that you are likely to hear much in the major media about the visit. Too many reporters and editors prefer to "move on" from the Clinton years. But with Hillary Clinton's impending presidential campaign, a return engagement may be just around the historical corner.

News that President Bush's tax reform panel will eschew more sweeping plans in favor of incremental changes has conservatives again scratching their heads and feeling a bit deflated. The panel chaired by former GOP Senator Connie Mack and former Democratic Senator John Breaux might have sought a clean break from the tyranny of the IRS and proposed a postcard flat tax or a national consumption tax. Leo Linbeck, the chairman of the Fair Tax movement, which advocates a national sales tax, complains that the commission "is missing out on the massive populist appeal of tax reform, which is to eliminate the income tax and the IRS from our lives." He says the commission's approach "has all the makings of another top down tax reform, rather than a plan that bubbles up from the grass roots."

Dick Armey, a godfather of the flat tax, says that half measures won't do the trick. "For tax reform to galvanize the voters and to overcome the special interests, the plan needs to be pure, simple and revolutionary," he advises.

Almost everyone agrees that the commission, which will discuss its proposals in a conference call on Monday, would tilt the tax system in a pro-growth direction. Lower taxes on savings and investment would be accompanied by steps to rein in some sacred-cow but expensive tax loopholes. Almost everyone likes the panel's idea of phasing out the hated alternative minimum tax, which now hits one taxpayer in six. Chuck Schumer and other liberal Democrats from high-tax states are trashing the commission's idea of limiting the home mortgage deduction, the state and local tax deduction, and the health care deduction. Some conservatives are too. Larry Hunter of the Free Enterprise Fund frets that this could be perceived as a "tax increase on the middle class."

With the approval ratings for Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress tanking lately, the hope was that tax reform--a boilerplate Republican issue--would help change the subject in Washington and jump start a moribund national party. But while the tax reform panel seems set on endorsing some useful surgical repairs to the tax system, many grassroots activists were counting on Mr. Mack and company to sweep away tens of thousands of pages of incomprehensible tax code and the IRS. For the past decade, the tax reform movement has been split down the middle between the flat taxers and the national sales tax crowd. Neither group is filled with happy campers this week.