Conservative critics of Harriet Miers have questioned her reliability on bringing a right-wing worldview to the Supreme Court. Yesterday, those same conservatives learned that Miers publicly pledged in 1989 to “actively support” a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
Has this improved her standing in the conservative community? That depends entirely on whom you ask.
Some Republicans said they were not convinced by a 16-year-old promise from her brief foray into local politics; others said that too much uncertainty hovers around her beliefs overall. “That shows where her political views were,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of the 10-question form she filled out for the Texas antiabortion group, then called Texans United for Life. “But I don’t think it tells us how she would rule on a particular case.”
Paul M. Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation, which is not supporting Miers, said: “There is absolutely no guarantee that she would end up voting that way if given the opportunity.”
It’s safe to say the divided right remains divided. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said the new information “will be a positive for her with me and with others who care about the life issue,” while Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) said this is “a piece of evidence, but it is not dispositive one way or another.”
Helping to summarize the political environment here, a Republican Senate leadership aide told ABC News, “I’m not hearing good things about White House efforts to turn the corner. The only argument they seem to be putting forward is ‘we don’t need an intramural scrimmage right now.’ The latest courtesy meetings haven’t gone well because she has not been so forthcoming. The questionnaire was subpart at best and late.”
And it’s safe to say Robert Bork’s latest thoughts won’t help the pro-Miers crowd either.
With a single stroke — the nomination of Harriet Miers — the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That’s not a bad day’s work — for liberals.
There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association’s journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no “ability to write clearly and argue incisively.”
The administration’s defense of the nomination is pathetic….
To be fair, Bork’s column was written for the Wall Street Journal before the information about Miers’ support for an anti-abortion amendment came to the public’s attention, but given the level of Bork’s ire, I don’t think it would have mattered.