In Their Own Words: Harriet Miers' Withdrawal: Right Wing Bill Comes Due

Not so long ago, the Republican Party’s right-wing base shared a few simple principles when it came to the president’s judicial nominees:

• That the president had the right to pick his own nominee;
• That inquiring about a nominee’s religious views was off-limits;
• That there should be no abortion “litmus test” for confirmation;
• That the president did not need to extensively consult with anybody prior to naming a nominee; and
• That all of the president’s nominees deserved an “up or down” vote on the Senate floor!

But shortly after the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the Right all but abandoned these “principles” and instead launched a successful, multi-pronged attack to kill her nomination.

The level of hypocrisy from the Right regarding this nomination is remarkable, even for them.

• They praised John Roberts for refusing to answer questions, yet began “circulating lists of questions they want[ed] members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Miers at her confirmation hearings” hoping to trip her up.
• They decried questions about Roberts’ faith or his views on abortion, yet began soon to tout Miers’ faith as proof of her views on abortion.
• They demanded an “up or down vote” on all the president’s judicial nominees — and even advocated destroying the filibuster to guarantee them — but began calling for the withdrawal of Miers' nomination before hearings had even begun.
• They told the president he didn’t need to consult with anyone before making his decision because they trusted him to fulfill his promise to give them another nominee like Justices Scalia and Thomas, but declared that they cannot blindly trust him when he said Miers met that standard.

Gone were the calls from the Right for a “fair hearing” followed by an up or down vote for Miers. Gone too were the demands that senators defer to the president in filling vacancies on the federal courts.

But the Right did not fall silent. If anything, it grew bolder and louder — ultimately demanding that Miers’ nomination be withdrawn. On Thursday, thanks in part to a growing display of opposition evidenced by ads, petitions, op-eds and a handful of newly created coalitions, the Right managed to bring down its own president’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

Though Miers sought to use concerns over executive privilege as a smoke-screen for her withdrawal, there is very little doubt that it was the unprecedented outpouring of opposition from the president’s right-wing base that doomed her nomination.

To be fair, some on the Right openly supported and defended Miers, though it seems that they did so, in large part, based on private assurances, and under pressure, from the White House.

But for a significant number of right-wing leaders and activists, a “trust me” from President Bush was not enough to convince them that Miers was the ultra-conservative ideologue they had been “promised” by Bush. So they mobilized to pressure the president to withdraw her nomination.

That Was Then

From the moment John Roberts was nominated, the Right was willing to believe the assurances of emissaries who spoke out on his behalf that they had been given a nominee in the mold of Justices Thomas and Scalia. They quickly coalesced around strategies to ensure his confirmation.

Within days, the Right was attacking anyone who raised the issue of Roberts’ religion, claiming that he was superbly qualified for the position and that his faith should play no role in the confirmation process.

But with Miers, the Right was far less convinced of her qualifications — or rather, was far less willing to believe that she shared their right-wing ideology — and so her faith quickly became central to the discussion of her fitness for the bench. In fact, the White House even went so far as to personally assure right-wing figures like James Dobson that, in Dobson’s words, “Harriet Miers is an evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life, that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion, that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life.”

Miers’ religion became a way to reassure the Radical Right that she was one of them, and seemed to be a not-so-subtle way of signaling that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Other more direct assurances followed. As John Fund reported: “On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends--both sitting judges--said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.”

Whether Miers actually would have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade was nearly impossible to determine, considering that there was almost nothing known about her judicial philosophy. For its part, the Right was unwilling to take any chances, especially after it was reported in the Washington Post that Miers had delivered a speech in 1993 where she said that deference to "self-determination" should guide courts when making decisions about issues like abortion and school prayer.

That uncertainly about Roe and other issues of importance to the Radical Right, is in large part what drove their opposition to her nomination.

According to “WithdrawMiers.org,” a coalition formed by the Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, Fidelis, and others for the sole purpose of opposing the nomination: “Miers’ … few published writings offer no real insight or assurance of a judicial philosophy that reflects a commitment to the Constitution.” And on issues where Miers had something of a record, WithdrawMiers.org was not impressed: “Ms. Miers fought to remove the pro-abortion plank in the American Bar Association platform, yet fought this Bush Administration in ending the ABA’s role in vetting judges which is known to be biased against judges whose judicial philosophies reflect a clear commitment to the Constitution. She donated money to a Texas pro-life group, yet helped establish an endowed lecture series at Southern Methodist University that brought pro-abortion icons Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi to campus.”

Like WithdrawMiers.org, Americans for Better Justice sprang up simply to oppose the Miers nomination. Founded by ultra-conservatives like David Frum, Linda Chavez, and Roger Clegg, ABJ was unconvinced that Miers shared its founders’ right-wing views and began gathering signatures on a petition demanding Miers’ withdrawal: “The next justice of the Supreme Court should be a person of clear, consistent, and unashamed conservative judicial philosophy … The next justice should be someone who has demonstrated a deep engagement in the constitutional issues that regularly come before the Supreme Court — and an appreciation of the originalist perspective on those issues … For all Harriet Miers’ many fine qualities and genuine achievements, we the undersigned believe that she is not that person.”

The right-wing magazine National Review had, in many ways, led the charge against the Miers nomination from the very beginning. Its writers called Miers “a very, very bad pick,” declared her nomination “the most catastrophic political miscalculation of the Bush presidency” and complained that the Right had been forced to endure “an embarrassingly lame campaign from the White House, the Republican National Committee, and their surrogates.”

What caused this gnashing of teeth was the fact that, according to the National Review’s editorial board, “There is very little evidence that Harriet Miers is a judicial conservative, and there are some warnings that she is not … neither being pro-life or an evangelical is a reliable guide to what kind of jurisprudence she would produce, even on Roe, let alone on other issues.”

Others on the Right were just as dismayed by the nomination. American Values’ Gary Bauer explained: “[Harriet Miers] has not written one word, said one word, given a speech, written a letter to the editor on any of the key constitutional issues that conservatives care about and are worried about and want to make sure the court does not go down the road on."

The Wall Street Journal called the nomination a “political blunder of the first order,” lamenting that “After three weeks of spin and reporting, we still don't know much more about what Ms. Miers thinks of the Constitution.”

Stephen Crampton of the American Family Association said Miers is a “stealth candidate for a seat on the Supreme Court [and] is an unknown with no paper trail,” while the Christian Defense Coalition blasted the president, saying his supporters “did not stand out in the rain for 20 hours passing out literature or putting up signs for the President to have him turn around and nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. A nominee in which there is no record of their judicial philosophy or view of the Constitution.”

Back when John Roberts was preparing for his confirmation hearing, Concerned Women for America was praising him as a “highly qualified nominee with extraordinary personal integrity who has proven himself worthy to sit on our nation's highest court.” CWA said “Senators should ignore the ridiculously inappropriate litmus tests and document demands of the radical left” and that Roberts “should receive overwhelming bi-partisan support and confirmation.”

This is in stark contrast to the stand CWA took on Miers: “We believe that far better qualified candidates were overlooked and that Miss Miers’ record fails to answer our questions about her qualifications and constitutional philosophy … We do not believe that our concerns will be satisfied during her hearing." In calling for her withdrawal, CWA revealed their real objection: “Miers is not even close to being in the mold of Scalia or Thomas, as the President promised the American people.” They demanded that the president give them a “nomination that we can whole-heartedly endorse.”

The Right is Responsible

Whatever justifications right-wing leaders may now give for their opposition to Miers, the real reason they killed her nomination was that they were not convinced that she shared their radical ideology. Right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan layed out the fears of the radical right when he complained that President Bush had been “handed a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reshape the Supreme Court to better reflect the extreme right-wing agenda, but by nominating Miers “may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren.”

The people of this country will never find out what kind of justice Miers might have been or what sort of judicial philosophy she held — we have all been denied the opportunity by the Radical Right to learn more about those things by going through a dignified and fair hearing process.

The Right will accept nothing less than the nomination of a committed ideologue, one dedicated to rolling back decades of advances in protecting the civil rights and liberties of all Americans, one that would tilt the balance of the court in their favor for decades to come. The mere suspicion that Miers might not have been an ultra-conservative zealot was, for the Right, reason enough to kill her nomination.

Make no mistake, concerns over “internal [White House] documents” did not sink the Miers nomination, Bush’s Radical Right Wing base did.