It had the makings of an interesting broadcast. A week after James Dobson raised bi-partisan eyebrows by claiming to have secret insights into Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination, the religious right leader announced he’d tell all in a scintillating national radio broadcast.
In what can only be described as an anticlimactic letdown, Dobson didn’t have much to share. The question now becomes whether Dobson is telling the truth now, or whether he was exaggerating his knowledge all along.
The full transcript of Dobson’s “tell-all” is online, but here’s the crux of the message.
“[M]y reasons for supporting her were twofold, John. First, because Karl Rove had shared with me her judicial philosophy which was consistent with the promises that President Bush had made when he was campaigning. Now he told the voters last year that he would select people to be on the Court who would interpret the law rather than create it and judges who would not make social policy from the bench. Most of all, the President promised to appoint people who would uphold the Constitution and not use their powers to advance their own political agenda. Now, Mr. Rove assured me in that telephone conversation that Harriet Miers fit that description and that the President knew her well enough to say so with complete confidence.
“Then he suggested that I might want to validate that opinion by talking to people in Texas who knew Miers personally and he gave me the names of some individuals that I could call. And I quickly followed up on that conversation and got glowing reports from a federal judge in Texas, Ed Kinkeade and a Texas Supreme Court justice, Nathan Hecht, who is highly respected and has known Harriet Miers for more than 25 years. And so, we talked to him and we talked to some others who are acquainted with Ms. Miers. […]
“Some of the other candidates who had been on that short list, and that many conservatives are now upset about were highly qualified individuals that had been passed over. Well, what Karl told me is that some of those individuals took themselves off that list and they would not allow their names to be considered, because the process has become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter, that they didn’t want to subject themselves or the members of their families to it.”
The problem is, there’s no reason to believe any of this.
James Dobson’s not-so-explosive revelations are, in a nutshell, that Rove told him Miers would be great, some folks in Texas agreed, and none of the other conservatives on the short list wanted the job because the mean ol’ Democrats might be unpleasant during the confirmation hearings.
Dobson may be stark raving mad, but he’s not a fool. He’s wanted an unambiguously right-wing judiciary for as long as he’s been in public life. The whole point of the division within the GOP right now is that Miers is an unknown quantity who lacks a reliable track record. The word of the White House and some Bush allies in Texas isn’t good enough for the conservative base, and common sense tells us that it’s generally not good enough for Dobson either.
And there’s no way in the world that Dobson believes that conservative federal judges would intentionally turn down a chance to serve a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court for fear of a few weeks of contentious confirmation hearings. That’s absurd.
Which brings us to a few possibilities.
1. Rove lied to Dobson, and for reasons that are unclear, Dobson bought it.
2. Dobson really did get confidential information about Miers’ beliefs and he’s lying about it now.
3. Dobson never really had confidential information at all, and his boasts of special access were just meant to exaggerate his own significance.
Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m leaning towards Door #2. Dobson didn’t expect the heat his comments generated, he knows appearing under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee could be embarrassing, so he had good reason to tell a boring version of what really transpired in the hopes of making this controversy fade away.
This is just my personal speculation, but it’s as good an explanation as any.