The Nine [148]
In fact, the “base” was a couch—in the living room of the Capitol Hill town house belonging to a former congressional staffer named Manuel Miranda. A year earlier, Miranda had been forced out of his job as a staffer for Bill Frist, majority leader of the Senate, when it was revealed that he had been reading the e-mails of Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee. So Miranda set up shop at home, founding what he called, rather grandly, the Third Branch Conference, which mostly amounted to himself, his laptop, and cordless phone. But Miranda knew almost everyone in the conservative legal movement, and his blast e-mails and conference calls became a key conduit of anti-Gonzales information.
Just two hours after O’Connor’s retirement became public on the morning of July 1, Miranda scheduled a conference call with his allies, telling them he was “urging that the nomination not be Alberto Gonzales.” After the long weekend, Miranda elaborated on his reasons, saying that Gonzales “is not a movement conservative. He has not written prolifically on many issues. And so, there is no paper trail. And, we don’t know what he really thinks on many, many issues. That is something that conservatives on this nomination cannot tolerate. Justice David H. Souter did not have a paper trail. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had a paper trail, but not on the particular issues that conservatives wished to see. So, it’s really no more Souters and no more Kennedys. And that does not add up to an appointment for Gonzales.” Miranda wasn’t much more than a glorified blogger, but his passion and his contacts whipped his views into something like the conservative conventional wisdom. He helped popularize the devastating quip “ ‘Gonzales’ is Spanish for ‘Souter.’ ”
By this time, bigger guns than Miranda were taking up the anti-Gonzales cause. A delegation of conservative lawyers, led by former attorney general Edwin Meese III and C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel to the first President Bush, met with Andrew Card, the president’s chief of staff, to warn against a Gonzales appointment. The onslaught was so immediate and intense that Bush himself, who was on a state visit to Denmark on July 6, felt compelled to respond. “I don’t like it when a friend gets criticized. I’m loyal to my friends. And all of a sudden this fellow, who is a good public servant and a really fine person, is under fire,” Bush said. “And so, do I like it? No, I don’t like it at all.”
Inside the White House, the young Federalists in the counsel’s office—conservative firebrands themselves—watched the attacks on Gonzales with astonishment. They knew that he had been among the administration’s true believers, “a hundred percenter,” in the movement argot. Gonzales had taken the most aggressive position among Bush’s allies on the legal basis for the war on terror, dismissing the protections of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint.” He had reversed decades of precedent by refusing to submit Bush’s judicial nominees to the scrutiny of the American Bar Association, because he thought the ABA was too liberal. He had joined with Vice President Cheney in asserting a new and expansive view of executive power and concurred fully with the refusal to turn over the documents in the energy task force lawsuit. He had negotiated the government’s position in the Grutter and Gratz affirmative action cases (albeit with a slightly more sympathetic view than Dick Cheney and Ted Olsen) and had supervised the selection of the judicial nominees who had so outraged the Democrats that they were moved to filibuster. Gonzales had proved his conservative bona fides many times over. What do these people want? the young lawyers in the White House asked in bewilderment. He hired us, didn’t he? What did Gonzales