Court Nominee Gains Some Senate Support

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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WASHINGTON – A key Republican on the Senate committee that is reviewing Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers said yesterday that stepped-up efforts by conservative activists who want to derail the nomination, including a television and radio campaign scheduled to begin today, are likely to have the opposite effect.


Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, said that if Ms. Miers withdrew now she would only hurt Republican senators who are uneasy about her nomination. It would suggest that special interest groups control the nomination process, he said. Mr. Graham said the nominee can’t withdraw for this reason alone and that the hearings will go forward as planned.


“If she withdraws, that means that we, the party and the president, have given in to special interest politics who want to shake up the process,” Mr. Graham said in an interview. “So I am dead set against her withdrawing, especially now. I don’t want special interest groups on the right or the left to hijack the nomination process.”


Mr. Graham’s comments came two days after he and another Republican on the committee, Senator Brownback, of Kansas, called on the White House to release documents related to Ms. Miers’s tenure there. President Bush has said he will not release privileged communications, prompting some to wonder whether Republicans are establishing the framework for a principled withdrawal.


Mr. Graham denied that such a strategy was at play, saying that Ms. Miers will have a hearing despite intense opposition from prominent conservatives. The committee’s chairman, Senator Specter, also sought to shift attention away from critics and toward the hearings yesterday, saying he is confident that a compromise could be reached with the White House and that the hearing will determine Ms. Miers’s fate.


“What’s really going to be important is her testimony,” Mr. Specter said. “We want to know what her views are.”


Mr. Graham’s comments carry particular weight because, unlike Mr. Brownback or another Republican critic of Ms. Miers, Senator Allen, of Virginia, he is not concerned about positioning himself for a presidential run in 2008, and because he is one of the Senate’s most vocal social conservatives.


He has also shown independence from the White House by joining the so-called gang of 14 that brokered a bipartisan deal in May that blocked the Republican leadership from breaking a Democratic filibuster of several of Mr. Bush’s nominees to federal appeals courts.


The campaign against Ms. Miers, Americans for Better Justice, was organized by a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, David Frum. The group plans to run a commercial beginning tonight that features negative quotes about Ms. Miers by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and a former Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork. The group’s Web site is www.betterjustice.org.


The commercial will air for a week on two Fox News programs, a spokesman, Kevin McVicker, said, as well as on nationally syndicated radio shows hosted by Mr. Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. The campaign’s $250,000 price tag, not including public relations costs, is being covered by donors from across the country, Mr. McVicker said.


A member of the group’s board of advisers who is the general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Roger Clegg, disputed Mr. Graham’s description of the coalition and its campaign as the work of special interests. He said the group is not calling for a withdrawal because of Ms. Miers’s judicial views on a specific issue but, because her judicial perspective on most issues is unknown.


“I think it depends on how you define a special interest,” Mr. Clegg said. “I think that people who are generally sympathetic to the president but who think he’s made a mistake, think he made a mistake not because of how she’s going to vote on one particular issue but because of her not having developed a solid judicial philosophy, and that ought to be taken seriously if any kind of public outcry is taken seriously.”


The nomination of the 60-year-old Ms. Miers, a White House counsel and former Dallas attorney, has put a number of Republicans in a difficult spot. Some, like Mr. Brownback and Senator Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, are said to be hearing complaints from constituents. Others say they are left trying to defend a nominee that they know very little about.


The Washington Post reported that in a speech Ms. Miers delivered 10 years ago, while president of the Texas Bar Association, she emphasized the importance of “self-determination” regarding issues such as abortion and school prayer, another possible point of contention with some conservatives. She said that in cases where scientific facts are disputed and religious beliefs vary, “government should not act,” according to the newspaper.


Ms. Miers said that sometimes “officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: I did not want to do that – the court is making me,” the Post reported.


A former Judiciary Committee counsel who has been one of the most outspoken critics of Ms. Miers, Manuel Miranda, said Mr. Specter has said that he does not think Ms. Miers is a good nominee.


“It is no secret in the Senate what Mr. Specter thinks of Ms. Miers’s qualifications,” Mr. Miranda said.


Mr. Specter denied that he has told anyone his views on Ms. Miers.


“Absolutely not,” Mr. Specter said. “Give me their names, they’ll be subpoenaed. I have not told anybody that.”


The dispute over Mr. Specter’s personal views about the nominee reflects a nomination process that he described last week as chaotic. The Senate’s potential standoff with the White House over documents, the conservative advertising campaign, and a two-hour cross-examination Monday of conservative participants of an October 3 conference call with White House surrogates on the Miers nomination have only added to the sense of confusion and unpredictability.


The president of the conservative group American Values, Gary Bauer, issued a statement yesterday discussing a cross-examination, that was conducted by judiciary committee staff, and expressed frustration with the nomination process. Mr. Specter is concerned about the conference call because of a report last week that said the surrogates had assured participants that Ms. Miers would vote to overturn the abortion case Roe v. Wade, if confirmed.


“The two-hour interview yesterday was not hostile or argumentative,” Mr. Bauer said. “But I must admit I couldn’t help but feel anger about the whole situation. A handful of far-left senators have essentially taken control of the confirmation process. They threaten to run through the gauntlet any nominee that believes the Constitution doesn’t include a right to abortion. They destroyed Robert Bork and almost did the same to Clarence Thomas.”


Mr. Bork, a former solicitor general whose nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 was rejected by a Democratic Senate, said he would like to see Ms. Miers withdraw but that he pities her for being subjected to attacks. Mr. Bork has written and spoken against the nominee, but he said he does not want to join political efforts aimed at thwarting her. Told about a commercial that will run today featuring his name, he said he would seek to have his name removed.


“I feel sorry for her because she probably didn’t know what she was getting into and it’s very hard to read stuff about yourself day after day after day,” Mr. Bork said. “I haven’t got any advice to give her. I don’t know what she should do. I think she’d be better off withdrawing, but I think she would find me giving her personal advice a little insane.”

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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