October
4, 2005
Bush's Dangerous Choice
By E.
J. Dionne Jr.
WASHINGTON
-- President Bush certainly thought he was making the safe and
clever choice when he nominated Harriet Miers to the United States
Supreme Court. Precisely because the choice was too clever, it
could prove to be dangerous both to Bush and his party.
In selecting
his White House counsel, Bush seemed determined not so much to
satisfy anyone in particular as to offend no one at all. Many
voices insisted that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor needed to be
replaced by a woman. Democrats who had supported Chief Justice
John Roberts said they would battle hard against any right-wing
ideologue. Social conservatives said they would not be satisfied
with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or anyone else who showed
signs of being treacherously moderate on abortion.
Miers got
to the top of the list because she could check the first box and
leave the other two blank. Since so much of her career has been
outside of public view -- either as a corporate lawyer or as a
loyal Bush insider -- Democrats eager to keep a staunch conservative
off the court have no idea where she stands on most issues. The
paper trail on her views might not even fill one drawer of a filing
cabinet.
Article
Continues Below
The social
conservatives have nothing obvious to hold against her. Her one
major public intervention on the abortion question was to push
for a referendum to move the American Bar Association from support
of Roe v. Wade to neutrality.
Yet that
may be enough to unsettle the liberals without satisfying the
conservatives. The early returns from certain key conservative
precincts were not good for Miers. Manuel Miranda, a conservative
activist on judicial issues, said the choice of a nominee ``with
no judicial record'' was ``a significant failure.'' William Kristol,
the conservative editor and strategist, said the selection left
him ``disappointed, depressed and demoralized.''
With the
Miers nomination, Bush is indeed signaling that after a summer
of discontent over Iraq followed quickly by the Katrina catastrophe,
he does not have the stomach for a big fight. He was not willing
to spend his dwindling political capital either on behalf of his
good friend Gonzales or for a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia
or Clarence Thomas, the duo whose jurisprudence Bush has often
praised. The Miers pick risks looking like a sign of weakness.
What's odd
is that even at the level of tough, practical politics -- the
arena in which Bush and his senior lieutenant Karl Rove have excelled
until recently -- this choice may open doors that the president
would prefer to hold shut. At the very moment Bush is battling
charges of cronyism (and when his most memorable recent statement
was about the heck of a job Brownie was doing), Bush has sought
an appointee from about as deep inside his inner circle as he
could go. No one will miss the fact that back in 1998, it was
Miers who was responsible for looking into Bush's Vietnam era
draft record to prepare for damage control.
And so Bush
has put himself and his administration's goal of aggrandizing
presidential power on the line in a way the Roberts nomination
did not. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary
Committee who voted for Roberts, could not resist noting that
Miers ``has a reputation for being loyal to this president, whom
she has a long history of serving as a close adviser and in working
to advance his objectives.'' Leahy added: ``It is important to
know whether she would enter this key post with the judicial independence
necessary when the Supreme Court considers issues of interest
to this administration.'' Those are fighting words, carefully
chosen.
It's also
strange that Bush, whose greatest obsession has been to maintain
his political base, would select a candidate who may end up without
any base at all. She could face opposition from the right, whose
partisans devoutly wished for a nominee with strong judicial credentials
and a clear conservative record. Under other circumstances, this
might entice liberals into hoping Miers is a closet moderate.
But their instinctive mistrust of someone so close to Bush will
keep many liberals from coming her way.
Roberts
offered a little something to everyone -- and that included even
those who opposed him but acknowledged his credentials and his
intelligence. Miers has been thrust into a battle for which her
career as a Bush loyalist is more liability than asset, and in
which the clean slate she puts forward could be filled in primarily
by her opponents.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
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