Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush ended his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court Thursday and promised a quick replacement. Democrats accused him of bowing to the “radical right wing of the Republican Party,” according to this AP story.

The White House said Miers had withdrawn her name because of a bipartisan effort in Congress to gain access to internal documents related to her role as counsel to the president. But politics played a larger role: Bush’s conservative backers had doubts about her ideological purity, and Democrats had little incentive to help the nominee or the embattled GOP president.

The withdrawal stunned Washington on a day when the capital was awaiting potential bad news for the administration on another front - the possible indictments of senior White House aides in the CIA leak case. Earlier in the week, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq hit 2,000

President Bush said he reluctantly accepted Miers’ decision to withdraw, after weeks of insisting that he did not want her to step down.

It is a critical defeat for a president already facing a storm cloud of criticism on a number of fronts. We told you reelecting Bush would be a big mistake and that his second term would be clouded in scandal. But did you listen America? No, of course not.

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