Posted on 10/04/2005 2:56:26 PM PDT by Ol' Sparky
Miers seems like anti-abortion moderate
DONNA CASSATA and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' footprints on contentious social issues suggest a moderate position on gay rights, an interest in advancing women and minorities and sympathy for anti-abortion efforts. Judging from the Smith & Wesson she once packed, she favors gun rights, too.
Miers' years as a corporate lawyer and White House insider have produced a record so scant that court-watchers are picking through 16-year-old Dallas city council votes and the like to divine how she might come down on constitutional matters.
She is not a completely blank slate.
A decade before the 2001 terrorist attacks, Miers defended constitutional freedoms in a time of danger, with words that would hearten two groups of activists in the post-9/11 world of added police powers - civil libertarians and the gun lobby.
"The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts," she wrote in Texas Lawyer, when she was president of the state bar. "Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble ... access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance.
"We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs."
Miers once owned a .45-caliber revolver, a gift from a brother who was worried about her safety when she lived alone in Dallas, says Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, who has known Miers for 30 years and has dated her.
"It's a huge gun - he wanted to be sure she stopped the guy," Hecht said in a telephone interview. The judge recalled one Sunday afternoon driving out to the country, setting up tin cans on a dirt road and trying to teach Miers how to shoot.
How was her aim?
"She was terrible," said Hecht, who added that she kept the gun for a long time but said he was unsure if she ever fired it again.
In her writings, Miers has pitched a brand of criminal justice that borrowed from the right and the left. On one hand, she insisted, "Punishment of wrongdoers should be swift and sure," and she appeared to have little patience for those who would excuse an act of violence by blaming society.
On the other hand, she pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime - poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction - must be addressed.
On the issue that commands the most attention for court nominees, Miers pressed unsuccessfully to have the American Bar Association put its policy in favor of abortion rights to a vote of the membership, showing a sensitivity, at least, to the anti-abortion movement, if not outright support of it.
Hecht said she has attended an evangelical church in Dallas, the Valley View Christian Church, for 25 years and "their position is and I'm sure her views are compatible with theirs."
Miers bought a $150 ticket to a Texas anti-abortion group's fund-raising dinner in 1989, the year she won a term on the Dallas city council, the group's president said. Kyleen Wright of the Texans for Life Coalition, then called Texans United for Life, said the dinner drew about 30 other officeholders or candidates as "bronze patrons," the lowest level of financial support.
"One would have to assume she is at least moderately pro-life, but how far that commitment goes, I really don't know," Wright said. "No one I know in the pro-life or pro-family movement knows her, locally or around the state."
In 1992, Miers said presidents have no business asking court nominees to toe their line on abortion.
"Nominees are clearly prohibited from making such a commitment and presidents are prohibited from asking for it," she said. People who think such inquiries are proper show "a misunderstanding of the separation of powers by proposing that judicial nominees should mirror a president's views."
In her current job as White House counsel, however, it is certain Bush already knows her opinion on a variety of issues.
In one of the few head-on expositions of her views on public policy, a short gay-rights survey she filled out during her city council campaign in 1989, Miers backed equal civil rights for homosexuals and spending on AIDS education while defending a Texas law - since overturned by the Supreme Court - that made gay sex a crime.
Despite that paradox, a leading gay-rights group credited her Tuesday with an open mind.
"It's only a small window into her thinking," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, "but it certainly, for me, raises the possibility that she's more fair-minded than our opponents are hoping."
The question on civil rights on the old survey did not pin respondents down on any of the issues typically associated with gay equality today, such as domestic partner benefits or same-sex unions. Kelly Shackelford, president of the socially conservative Free Market Foundation, played down the significance of Miers' answer, saying he, too, could have answered yes to it.
Shackelford credited her with "basic Texas down home values."
Solmonese said the fact Miers even came to a meeting of a Dallas gay and lesbian group to answer its questions suggested a wish to reach out.
"She's pro-family but not condemnatory," Hecht said.
Miers asserted during her city council campaign that "employers should be able to pick the best qualified person for any position, to be filled considering all relevant factors," a position that does not seem in support of mandatory affirmative action. In her own legal career, she broke a glass ceiling and led the way for others.
In 1972, Miers was the first woman hired by the Dallas law firm of Locke Purnell Rain Harrell, when Texas was far from friendly terrain for women attorneys.
Linda Eads, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who was deputy attorney general in Texas, recalls inappropriate questions during job interviews as well as male attorneys who couldn't imagine a high-powered woman at their firm.
The questions ranged "from what I was doing about birth control to how could you possibly think union leaders would want to talk to a girl," Eads said.
At Locke Purnell, Miers worked to ensure that more women joined the firm.
Tom Connop, a partner at the firm - now known as Locke Liddell & Sapp - said Miers was an advocate of employing not only women but minorities, reflected in the more than a dozen female associates in 1984.
In 1996, Miers became the firm's first female president.
"Every woman lawyer in Dallas, Texas, owes a debt to Harriet Miers," said Robin P. Hartmann, a partner with the Dallas law firm of Haynes and Boone who argued cases with and against Miers.
"One would have to assume she is at least moderately pro-life, but how far that commitment goes, I really don't know," Wright said. "No one I know in the pro-life or pro-family movement knows her, locally or around the state."
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What a missed opportunity, indeed.
She sounds more and more like another O'Connor. Someone whose core ideological convictions are subject to negotiation or even unknown.
Good but far from good enough.
Wait a minute. This gal was packing heat? How many panty waisted left wing wackos pack a pistol? Answer: zero.
Don't know about you guys, but I have found that liberals are literally afraid of guns. I had some friends over to see a football game once and brought out my unloaded hunting rifle to show one of them a new scope I'd mounted on it.
The liberal got very nervous and asked me to put it away.
If this gal was carrying a pistol, this is solidly reassuring.
And apparently he's left the brainless wonders in the party in the dust. What part of the anti-abortion pro-gun rights part of this article sailed over your head?
That idiodic claim has already been debunked.
Man, the MSM puts down its bait and conservatives are just lined up to take it hook, line and sinker. You'd think you folks would have learned by now.
The part that he is unwilling to acknowledge, because it might upset his preconceptions.
Bush knows EXACTLY where she stands. He is just not saying anything in public so that she remains confirmable. He has known this woman for 20 years. He knows 100% where she stands. People who think otherwise are idiots. Bush isn't playing a game here, or playing nice. Roberts is going to be the best CJ of the SCOTUS ever, and I have zero doubt Meirs is going to be stellar as well.
I think you're right. The strategery of course is to confound the libs. Despite Bush's base who wanted a show of strength to put the Dems away, such an action would rally the Democratic base and give them that fund raising opportunity to find sympathy with soccer moms and their naughty daughters. So Bush spends some capital with his base and sends in church lady Harriet knowing she's got some good people around her like Thomas, Scalia, and now Roberts. Who is Harriet going to hang with? Miss Grundy Ginsberg so they can talk about their roscoes? I don't think so.
This is a woman that has supported tax increases, gay adoption, an international criminal court and women in combat positions.
It's no wonder things never change in this nation when idiots like you support stealth, unknown candidates that have support all that.
Gee, do you think if conservatives were smart enough as a group to demand known originalist, we might actually get some nominated?
Ya think that's why the vast majority of conservatives are upset with this nomination?
You're dumber than dirt.
Now, now.
She's a woman and was nominated by President Bush.
What else do we have to know?????
Ah, so that justifies you taking the MSM bait hook, line and sinker.
A known originalists should have been appointed whose record on these issues was clear.
You mean someone like Robert Bork? Someone who believes something like this:
The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts. Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of liberties, access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance. We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs.
Oh, wait a minute, I got mixed up. Bork didn't write that. Miers did. This is what Bork wrote about the 2nd Amendment:
"The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.''
So, now, who would YOU rather have on the Supreme Court for a 2nd Amendment case - a noted scholar like Bork? Or a simpler person like Miers.
But I'm the one dumber than dirt. Go figure.
Sparky, you keep throwing out the same old discredited lines, don't you?
Just to make it clear once again, the subjects of gay adoption and the ICC were on an agenda her committee had to put together for an ABA meeting. The topics were submitted to her committee by other groups within the ABA. In other words, the people recommending and supporting these ideas were other ABA members, not Harriet Miers! There is no indication she had any control over the choice of topics - rather, they had to determine the order of speakers, etc.
By the way, Reagan once raised taxes too, didn't he? More than once, as a matter of fact (if you include his stint as Governor).
If you don't like Miers, Sparky, at least find honest reasons - don't keep using the same disproven lies and half-truths on every thread you soil.
I'm surprised to hear that. I wonder if it is for a future prez run. Are you sure it is hers and not her hubby's?
"Bush betrayed us with a clone of Ginnsburg. Whahhh..."
This reminds me of Economics: The art of finding a best-fit straight line through a single data point.
There are some on this site that are currently "Borking" Miers all based on the MSM/Democraps spin machines!
This leaves me to once again believe that like the Ultra Left, the Ultra Right are ill informed and should form there own party -- but they would not have enough votes to win anything!
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