Bush White House crisis deepens: The contradictions of the Miers nomination

Right-wing media pundits have been near unanimous in their opposition to Miers, with columns blasting the selection from George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and other usual Bush allies. The nomination was branded a bad joke, an insult to Bush’s most diehard supporters, a capitulation to the Democratic Party, even a betrayal. A conference of right-wing activists, held Wednesday to mark 50 years of the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review, seethed with dissatisfaction over the Miers nomination.

Most representatives of the right-wing anti-abortion, anti-tax and anti-gay lobbies were hostile, with the exception of a few prominent Christian fundamentalist preachers who said they had received direct assurances from the White House that Miers was a certain vote on the high court for their positions on social issues.

James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, reputed to be the most influential fundamentalist minister, said he was satisfied with Miers’s views after a discussion of the nomination with Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove. He refused, however, to say what Rove had told him, telling his audience, “You will have to trust me on this one.”

In other words, the unelected televangelist is privy to information that the Bush administration intends to deny the Senate Judiciary Committee when it holds hearings on the Miers nomination next month. The White House has already made it clear that it will not release any documents on which Miers worked during her five years as staff secretary, deputy chief of staff and counsel to the president. And Miers will follow the example of John Roberts in refusing to answer direct questions about her views on the repeal of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion as well as other contentious social issues.

Ironies abound in the conflict over Miers. Republican politicians and pundits who claimed that it would amount to a breach of procedure to ask Roberts his views on abortion or gay rights now insisted such questions should be posed to Miers in the upcoming confirmation hearings. In the Roberts hearing, the White House denounced questions about the nominee’s embrace of an ultra-conservative brand of Catholicism, branding it an unconstitutional religious test. But now the same spokesmen were touting Miers’s affiliation to an evangelical Christian church to reassure the anti-abortion lobby and the anti-gay bigots.

In this conflict between rival right-wing factions, the charges by both sides carry an element of truth. Opponents of the nomination declared it to be the product of cronyism that revealed an insular, arrogant White House. They characterized Miers as intellectually mediocre and with little experience in constitutional law, a description reinforced by an incident during a Miers visit to Capitol Hill. Asked which Supreme Court justice she admired most, she replied, “Warren”—not distinguishing between the liberal chief justice Earl Warren and his conservative successor Warren Burger. After prompting, she settled on Burger, one of the seven justices who upheld abortion rights in the Roe v. Wade decision.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/mier-o10.shtml