How very very ... odd.
Harriet E. Miers, legal record/resume
A Sampling of the Writings of Harriet Miers (Time.com)
By SONJA STEPTOE/DALLAS
What kind of Supreme Court justice would Harriet Miers be? For anyone trying to assess her qualifications, analyze her philosophy and predict her behavior, Miers would seem to present a fairly blank slate. She has no judicial resume and hasn't left a long trail of noteworthy memos, briefs, oral argument transcripts or law journal articles.
Gay Rights
An indication of her stance on gay rights comes from this questionaire from the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas Miers filled out while running for the Dallas City Council in 1989. In it, she supported full civil rights for gays and lesbians and backed AIDS education programs for the city of Dallas. (Source: Quorumreport.com)
Views on the Law
Elsewhere, a search for indications of her personal views and writing skills turned up two articles penned by Miers for the legal publication Texas Lawyer. They show a concern for the rule of law—and an emphasis on collegiality, compromise and determination [...]
Miers issues
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 4, 2005, 7:35AM
Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers could face questioning on several issues during her confirmation hearings. Among them:
Civil rights: Miers favored equal civil rights for gays when she ran for Dallas City Council, and said the city had a responsibility to pay for AIDS education and patient services. But she opposed repeal of the Texas sodomy statute — a law later overturned by the Supreme Court. In a survey for the Lesbian/Gay Coalition of Dallas, Miers provides a hint of her thinking on homosexual rights issues. Miers answered Yes to: Do you believe that gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as non-gay men and women?....
[...] • Abortion: Miers tried to persuade the American Bar Association to reconsider its pro-abortion-rights stance. As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, Miers urged the ABA to put the abortion issue to a referendum of its full membership. She favored a neutral stance for the ABA. The ABA's policymaking body rejected the Texas proposal that would have surveyed 360,000 members.
Bush: Abortion not discussed with nominee (CNN)
President Bush said Tuesday he has never discussed abortion with White House counsel Harriet Miers, his nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
"Not to my recollection have I ever sat down with her [to discuss abortion]," Bush said in his first solo press conference since May. "What I have done is understand the type of person she is and the type of judge she will be."
The president said he has never discussed abortion during any his interviews with his judicial nominees, including Miers.
"There is no litmus test," Bush said. "What matters to me is her judicial philosophy. What does she believe the proper role of the judiciary is relative to the legislative and the executive branch? [...] "I don't want to put somebody on the bench who's this way today and changes," he said. "That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in finding somebody who shares my philosophy today and will have that same philosophy 20 years from now." [...]
... The religious right is going to hate her ... or at least hate many things about her. From that same CNN article:
...From 1989 to 1991, she was a member of the Dallas City Council -- political experience that would be unique among the sitting justices. (Profile)
While serving on the council, Miers gave $150 to Texans for Life, an anti-abortion rights group. But Kyleen Wright, the group's current president, said she is "not convinced" Miers is a committed opponent of abortion rights...
So let me get this straight-ish: she's in favor of gays having civil rights and in favor of appropriate AIDS treatment ... but she doesn't think that gays should actually have the right to have sex without police harrassment, and she's not in favor of the right to choose.
Huh.
... That's an unusual combination of positions, that is. (Although, in some ways, it's very Catholic, pre-current-Benetictine, of course, in the sense that nonpracticing homosexuals -- as long as they weren't priests -- were once upon a time acceptable.) If nothing else it does indicate that she's not quite a doctrinaire conservative. Supporting gay rights in 1989 in Texas was a rather difficult thing to be doing, even in big-city Dallas, even with that peculiar little caveat. Of course, it says nothing about whether or not she still supports such things today. But the fact that she ever supported gay rights will make the Radical Right twitch. And the fact that she may be anti-choice is going to make the Liberal Left twitch. And, assuming that she is a decent politician, she'll be able to evade all questions on those topics, on the very reasonable grounds that she's going to be ruling on those issues and needs to present a clear mind. Being distrusted by the right and disliked by the left likely means that she'll get through on something like a 60-40 vote.
Posted by iain at October 04, 2005 01:01 PM
