Collapse of the Miers nomination: Bush administration bows to the ultra-right

The Miers nomination was torpedoed, not by the Democratic Party, the nominal opposition party in Congress, but by the religious fanatics and bigots who comprise the “base” of the Republican Party. These forces exercise an influence out of all proportion to their actual public support. The deepening crisis of the Bush administration, which is increasingly discredited both in domestic and foreign policy, compels it to rely even more on these far-right forces.

The official fiction is that Miers herself decided to withdraw her name from consideration because of demands from both Republican and Democratic senators that the Bush administration supply documents on her work as White House secretary, deputy chief of staff and counsel over the past four-and-a-half years. This the White House refused to do, citing the need to preserve the confidentiality of its internal deliberations.

Miers was herself no “moderate,” in the sense of being in any significant way opposed to the agenda of the extreme right. But she was not a proven, known quantity, and Bush’s efforts to focus attention on her evangelical Christian views proved inadequate.

The Christian right demanded more than personal opposition to abortion rights or gay marriage. They wanted a nominee publicly committed to using her judicial position to impose the fundamentalist agenda—banning abortion, sanctioning school prayer, criminalizing homosexuality—on the majority of the American people who oppose it.

The Miers nomination was under fire from the far right from its inception. The contrast between this strident right-wing opposition, and the tacit acceptance by these elements of John Roberts, Bush’s nominee for chief justice, is worth considering.

Roberts was no more publicly committed to the Christian right social agenda than Miers. The obvious question is whether the ultra-right received assurances—either explicit or based on his political record—that Roberts would be a certain defender of their agenda on the high court.

The final blow to the Miers nomination came on Wednesday. The Washington Post reported that Miers, in a speech to a Dallas, Texas professional women’s group in 1993, described the conflict over abortion rights in language that suggested she saw the issue as one of the democratic rights of women, rather than espousing the religious conception that the fetus is a full-fledged human being with an inviolable “right to life.”

“The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual woman’s right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion,” Miers said, according to the text published by the newspaper. “The more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes the most sense,” she continued. “Legislating religion or morality we gave up on a long time ago.” Miers went on to compare abortion clinic blockaders to terrorists.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/mier-o28.shtml