When George Bush nominated Harriet Miers to fill a vacancy on the US supreme court last week, there was some surprise (Rush Limbaugh really wasn't sure) but at least one point of agreement.
Sure, Ms Miers may never have been a judge, but her relative inexperience in the field meant there was no paper trail connecting her to past cases. That meant Democrats would be unable to tie her up on her record in confirmation hearings.
But a paper trail of sorts has now emerged. Using freedom of information laws, the New York Times has obtained the correspondence between Ms Miers and Mr Bush at a time when he was the Texas governor and she was his personal lawyer.
The exchanges are revealing, and sure to beef up the charges that one of Mr Bush's concerns when making new appointments is to reward long-term loyalists - a practice some call cronyism.
"You are the best governor ever - deserving of great respect," Ms Miers wrote in 1997. She also found Mr Bush "cool" and once told him to "keep up the great work. Texas is blessed".
The Miers nomination is shaping up to be one of the strangest moments of Mr Bush's second term. While small government fans have despaired of the US president's loose fiscal policy for some time now (in 2003, the libertarian Cato Institute called him the mother of all big spenders), he is also losing social conservatives who felt their support for his administration would be rewarded with a supreme court in their own image.
William Kristol, of the conservative Weekly Standard, considers the Miers nomination "at best an error, at worst a disaster [...] an unknown and undistinguished figure for an opening that conservatives worked for a generation to see filled with a jurist of high distinction."
Laura Bush, the first lady, today intervened to smooth the waters. She said sexism was probably motivating some of the critics, and added that Ms Miers' accomplishments as a lawyer were a role model to young women. Ms Miers, according to her paper trail, once described her as "the greatest".
