I had more or less assumed that when Harriet Miers acknowledged that she had lost her law license twice and the Senate Judiciary Committee sent back her questionnaire because her first try was “insulting,” this nomination couldn’t get much worse. I was wrong.
Over the weekend, there were a couple of interesting developments regarding Miers, one to make the right unhappy, the other to make the left unhappy. I’ll let you guess which is which.
First up is a Knight Ridder report on a very odd land deal back in Texas.
Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.
The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers’ law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.
The resulting six-figure payout to the Miers family in 2000 was despite the state’s objections to the “excessive” amount and to the process used to set the price. The panel recommended paying nearly $5 a square foot for land that was valued at less than 30 cents a square foot.
Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award from $106,915 to $80,915, but Miers, who controls the family’s interest in the land, hasn’t reimbursed the state for the $26,000 difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.
The controversy over Miers’ unusually large legal fees in 1998 with Bush’s gubernatorial campaign is troubling, but this raises far more serious questions. Indeed, Miers will need a pretty convincing explanation to prevent a story like this from derailing her nomination altogether.
And in the other story, there are new questions about Miers’ “philosophy” raising eyebrows throughout DC.
As president of the State Bar of Texas, Harriet Miers wrote that “our legal community must reflect our population as a whole,” and under her leadership the organization embraced racial and gender set-asides and set numerical targets to achieve that goal.
The Supreme Court nominee’s words and actions from the early 1990s, when she held key leadership positions as president-elect and president of the state bar, provide the first window into her personal views on affirmative action, an area in which the Supreme Court is closely divided and where Miers could tip the court’s balance. […]
Miers was a believer in mentoring programs, but during her tenure she and the board of directors went further, passing a resolution urging Texas law firms to set a goal of hiring one qualified minority lawyer for every 10 new associates. The directors also reiterated support for a policy of setting aside a specific number of seats on the board for women and minorities.
Yes, the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court embraced an affirmative action policy that sounds a whole lot like a quota system.
By the end of the week, it’ll be impressive if there’s anyone left who believes Miers’ nomination was a good idea.