The Miers Support Team: Gloomy and Demoralized [Byron York]

The Miers Support Team: Gloomy and Demoralized Now they’re discussing stopping her visits to the Senate.

Strategists working with the White House in support of the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers are becoming increasingly demoralized and pessimistic about the nomination's prospects on Capitol Hill in the wake of Miers's meetings with several Republican and Democratic senators. On a conference call held this morning, they even discussed whether Miers should simply stop visiting with lawmakers, lest any further damage be done — and so that time spent in such get-acquainted sessions will not cut into Miers's intensive preparation for her confirmation hearing.

The strategists discuss issues on a twice-weekly conference call led by Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society who has taken leave to help the White House shepherd the nomination through the Senate. A number of people who have taken part in the calls described the conversations to National Review Online. None wanted to be identified, because they do not want to openly oppose the White House or defy loyalists like Leo who are trying hard to defend Miers. Nevertheless, they paint a grim portrait of morale among those close to the nomination.

"The number of participants is declining," says one knowledgeable source. "With Roberts, these calls occurred five or six or seven times a week. Pretty early on, the calls on Miers were scaled back to twice a week. That says something in and of itself."

"It's been a gradual descent into almost silence," says a second source of the calls. "The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end....Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings."

"They are going to be keeping the meetings that they've already scheduled," says a third source. "But they have scheduled murder boards today from 12 to 5. She has to focus on her hearing. And the questionnaire that wasn't filled out, to me that's an indication [the White House] hasn't done the vetting. She has to spend a lot of time discussing stuff that should have been done before. So between those two things — finishing the questionnaire and preparing for the hearing, which is going to be make or break — they prefer to put her time into that."

"In the early days, there were people on the call who tried to give facile defenses of Miers, and they were immediately shot down," says a fourth source. "And by the way, those defenses weren't as insulting as the White House line — no way would they have done the 'sexist, elitist' line."

In summary, says the first source, "People have been looking for ways to support this. There are a lot of us who would like to find a reason to be encouraged. Every time I try to accommodate myself to this nomination, folks at the White House say idiotic things that piss me off, like that spin on Rove's part about her supposed deep involvement in judicial selection for three years, which is just not accurate."

"Demoralization and pessimism?" the source continues. "That's been a constant. We're in the various stages of grief."

Do you believe that she will actually answer any questions that will be revealing?

Yep. But not in the way folks want to hear her answer questions. There's going to be a lot of code talking going on. It is the Brownback's who need to be persuaded to go along.

The only thing will be able to determine is whether she is a good public speaker.

If that's what you want to know, let me tell you, she's a terrible public speaker!

Check out C-SPAN. They have a copy of a speech she gave to a lawyer's conference. But about three-quarters of the way through, if you listen, you start to hear bits and pieces of what Bush is trying to tell people. Just remember, if you take a look, this is not a bunch of academics or constitutional lawyers she's talking to.

OK, we need to come up with a definitive answer here. Is she the one that picked the judges for the last 3 years or not?

Just trying to flesh out my previous. Of course, she didn't literally "pick" any of them, but it's reasonable to believe that she was involved to one degree or another before being appointed to the position of WH Counsel.

Ms. Miers came to Washington D.C. in 2001 and began a period of distinguished and dedicated service that continues today.

She was appointed to be Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary on January 20, 2001.
In 2003, Ms. Miers was promoted to be Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff.
Ms. Miers has served as Counsel to the President since February, 2005.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/judicialnominees/miers.html
As staff secretary, she held the critical and demanding job of vetting every piece of paper that landed on Bush's desk or ended up in his nightly briefing book. ...

There is no precise job description for the White House counsel. ...
The office is now the principal vetter for judicial nominations, always a highly charged area and one that, in the next four years, will almost certainly have to approve a Supreme Court nominee or two. ...
"If you know you have Gonzales at Justice, does it matter who you have in the White House counsel's office?" muses the Washington lobbyist.
That's particularly true when it comes to judge picking.
"Right now, the White House counsel and the White House generally control a large part of the judicial selection process," explains John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy during the first Bush term. "But there's no natural reason that has to be the case," says Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. "Over time, the lead of picking justices has been in different places. Much of the function the White House counsel currently performs has been in the DOJ."
T.R. Goldman Legal Times 12-15-2004
Land says he trusts Bush's judgment on Harriet Miers
Oct 4, 2005
By Tom Strode
Baptist Press
President Bush's devotion to his promise to appoint only judges who faithfully interpret the Constitution has led Richard Land to trust newly selected Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers minus conflicting evidence, the Southern Baptist public policy leader said Oct. 4. ...
One of the people helping him to fulfill those campaign promises has been Harriet Miers, he said. She played an instrumental part in helping the president select those judicial nominees as his staff secretary, deputy chief of staff and White House counsel. She has worked closely with this president for more than a decade.
I do not know Harriet Miers. I do know President Bush and his commitment to a federal judiciary that lives within its constitutional assignment and interprets the law and doesnt write it from the bench, Land said. If the president trusts Harriet Miers to fulfill his campaign promises to the American people, then I trust Harriet Miers until I am given compelling evidence to the contrary.
http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=21782

And on a completely different aspect of Ms. Mires, this -> 1991 article from the Dallas Morning News provides a perspective that is lacking from the "her and now" discussion.

And on a REALLY different subject, if you want to compare and contrast Ms. Mires history and the taransparency of past nominees, here are links to ...

Nomination Hearings for: David H. Souter, Anthony M. Kennedy, William Hubbs Rehnquist (to CJ), Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, William H. Rehnquist (Assoc.), & Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/senate/judiciary/scourt.html

There's going to be a lot of code talking going on.

Thanks for the post.

It's the "code talking" that bothers me. What would be much better is a person that has been a judge and has lots of decisions to review. Knowing if she is personally for or against Roe v Wade shouldn't be important - what should be important is how she arrives at her decisions. If she issued a ruling for a conservative cause, but did so just for personal reasons and totally ignored what the law actually said then she would be a judicial activist.

That is what is so scary about all of this. We got lucky with Rhenquist - why press our luck?

We as a nation desperately need justices that will base their rulings on what the constitution actually say and not what they want them to say. Without a track record of judicial decisions, there is no way to know how Miers would actually base her decisions.

People say lots of things - talk is cheap. With complex issues like the Patriot Act and CFR, we need justices that we know will look at how the laws are written and are able to leave their personal ideologies at the door. Miers being an evangelical Christian has be used to bolster her creditals. What if a case involving religion came to the court where the Christian side was clearly in the wrong as the laws are currently written - how do we know if she could focus solely on what the law says? Without a track record, their is no reliable way to know.

Sure, Souter and Kennedy had track records that indicated that they might be good conservative justices, but did people look at why they ruled the way they did or just see if they tended to rule for conservative causes? Just because a person is against Roe doesn't mean that they would make a good justice.

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