{"id":5609,"date":"2005-10-22T11:19:54","date_gmt":"2005-10-22T15:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5609"},"modified":"2005-10-22T11:19:54","modified_gmt":"2005-10-22T15:19:54","slug":"a-miers-pullout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-miers-pullout\/","title":{"rendered":"A Miers pullout?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Harriet Miers sent over her responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire, it included a glaring error<\/a> on the equal protection clause. It was, in the words of one NYU law professor “a terrible answer…. If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.” Another law professor raised a more chilling possibility.<\/p>\n

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, also an expert on voting rights, said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers’ questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.<\/p>\n

“Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking,” she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The possibility of the White House intentionally<\/i> allowing Miers to provide the Senate an embarrassing response to the Judiciary Committee’s questions seems far fetched. That is, until you consider a new report from the Washington Times on the Bush gang looking for a way out<\/a> of this mess.<\/p>\n

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush’s choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday.<\/p>\n

“White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, ‘We’re not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?’ ” a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times.<\/p>\n

The White House denied making such calls. “Absolutely not true,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.<\/p>\n

But the conservative political consultant said that he had received such a query from Sara Taylor, director of the Office of White House Political Affairs. Miss Taylor denied making any such calls.<\/p>\n

A second Republican, who is the leader of a conservative interest group and has ties to the White House, confirmed that calls are being made to a select group of conservative activists who are not employed by the government.<\/p>\n

“The political people in the White House are very worried about how she will do in the hearings,” the second conservative leader said. “I think they have finally awakened.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are plenty of categorical denials here, but unfortunately, the Bush White House’s record on categorical denials isn’t reassuring. It seems hard to believe prominent conservative players could make this up out of whole cloth.<\/p>\n

Maybe it helps explain why online traders starting selling aggressively yesterday<\/a>, betting against her confirmation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Harriet Miers sent over her responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire, it included a glaring error on the equal protection clause. It was, in the words of one NYU law professor “a terrible answer…. If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}