WASHINGTON – At least two Republican senators are poised to call on the White House to withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a highly placed Republican Senate staffer told The New York Sun.

The news came amid stepped-up criticism of Ms. Miers by conservative groups and Senator Schumer. The conservatives said they were upset by the emergence yesterday of two speeches in which Ms. Miers said that self-determination should guide decisions involving religion and the law, and in which she cited conservative betes noires Janet Reno and Justice Ginsburg as female role models. Mr. Schumer, the Democrat of New York who serves on the Judiciary Committee, complained of the nominee’s delay in completing a follow-up questionnaire from the committee.

Several Republican senators have expressed concerns about Ms. Miers, but none has formally come out against her. An open defection by even one conservative senator would signal that Ms. Miers would have trouble making it through the Senate, conservative activists said.

“I think this will increase pressure on a withdrawal and lead to more pointed questions. I think with the documents that came out today and the speeches she gave will likely lead to at least a couple senators calling for a withdrawal. The things she said are just outrageous,” said the staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is the proof of all our deepest fears.”

Senator Schumer called the delay in the questionnaire “another in a series of disappointments.”

“The Miers nomination is suffering from a serious bout of delay, distraction, and disorganization and needs a dramatic turnaround,” Mr. Schumer said. Democrats had been holding their fire on the Miers nomination, hanging back and allowing Republicans to fight amongst themselves.

The two speeches, first reported late Tuesday by the Washington Post, angered conservative groups that had been maintaining a wait-and-see approach to the nomination. At least one such group, Concerned Women for America, announced yesterday that it had decided to call for a withdrawal. Others, including the American Conservative Union, were making preparations to do so.

“This speech has made if quite clear what her type of judicial philosophy would be – and that is that she has supported a radical agenda that relies upon the courts to impose social change,” the executive director of Concerned Women for America, Wendy Wright, said. “We wanted to support the president, but this speech made it very clear what her opinions, what her philosophy, is.”

The head of the American Conservative Union, David Keane, said he asked his 33-member board of directors yesterday to vote in favor of calling for a withdrawal of Ms. Miers. And the Family Research Council, which had also taken a wait-and-see approach, appeared poised late yesterday to make a similar move. In a daily letter to supporters, the group’s president, Tony Perkins, described the speeches by Ms. Miers as “very troubling.” The chairman of Focus on the Family, James Dobson, did not return calls yesterday for comment.

In one of the speeches, delivered to a women’s group in Dallas, Ms. Miers wrote that court cases involving law and religion typically grow out of an insistence on the part of individuals for more self-determination and that “the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes the most sense. Legislating religion or morality we gave up on a long time ago.” It was this passage that prompted the greatest concern among conservatives, who argue that court cases permitting universal access to abortion and gay marriage have been decided on the same principle.

In another speech, also from 1993,Ms. Miers said that women had just celebrated the naming of Janet Reno as the first woman to hold the post of U.S. attorney general. She cited Barbara Streisand and Justice Ginsburg approvingly in the same speech and said that the reason men dominate the U.S. Congress is “the control of financial resources.”

The Judiciary Committee said the answers to the questionnaire were expected late in the evening and would not be made publicly available until today.

Several traditional supporters of the president’s judicial nominees have been quiet in the past two weeks. The Committee for Justice, formed to promote the president’s nominees, sent out email alerts more than once a day before and during the confirmation hearing of John Roberts. The group’s messages have lately been reduced to a trickle.

An executive vice president at the Federalist Society who has been acting as a liason between the White House and conservatives, Leonard Leo, has also been largely absent from the debate in the past two weeks. Mr. Leo reportedly cancelled a speech he was to give this weekend at an annual meeting of the Catholic Leadership Conference in Arizona.

Political observers said the White House would only be likely to consider a withdrawal if it became clear that some Republicans would vote against Ms. Miers. Senator Vitter, a Republican of Louisiana, sent a letter to the White House yesterday requesting more information about Ms. Miers, a move that many interpreted as a sign of his opposition. Speculation grew yesterday that Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas, would send a similar letter today.