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The idea still made sense to the president—the appointment of, in effect, his own ideological clone who would attract no opposition from the Democrats in the Senate. That night Bush summoned Miers to the Oval Office and formally asked her whether she wanted to be considered. This time, she said yes.
Miers’s presence as an official candidate for the seat complicated the search process, which was now accelerating as Roberts’s confirmation grew nearer. (The Judiciary Committee approved Roberts on September 22.) Miers was not asked to bring in any other candidates for interviews with Bush. Only a handful of staffers, including Card, Rove, and Kelley, knew that Miers was a candidate, and they all honored Bush’s wish for a selection process without leaks. On the day that the committee approved Roberts, Kelley called Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and told him that Miers had become a serious candidate. They met the next day for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, and Leo said that Miers’s lack of a record would present a problem for conservative groups. “This would be a heavy lift,” he said. But Leo’s message never penetrated the upper levels of the White House. (During the following week, Leo tried to sound out his colleagues in the conservative movement about a Miers nomination, but no one would take the idea seriously. They didn’t approve or disapprove so much as dismiss her appointment as a possibility.) Every White House is an echo chamber of sorts, and leaks often serve the useful purpose of flushing out problems. But since there were no leaks about Miers, no one in the White House knew what the reaction to her nomination would be.
All of the top officials who were considering Miers’s appointment—Bush, Cheney, Card, Rove, and Miers herself—had relatively little idea what Supreme Court justices actually do all day. (“All we do is read and write,” Breyer liked to say. “I used to tell my son if you’re really good at doing homework, you get to do homework for the rest of your life.”) Everyone in Bush’s inner circle came out of the corporate world, where they believed that good judgment and instincts mattered more than reflective analysis. The same was true for corporate lawyers. Bush would never have dreamed of asking prospective members of his cabinet for writing samples, and he didn’t require them of Miers either. For the president, it was not a problem that Miers had no writing to offer.
Talking only to a handful of insiders—and again to Miers on September 28 and 29—Bush grew more and more convinced that she was a good choice. Their last conversations had to do less with whether she belonged on the Supreme Court and more with whom the White House might recruit as knowledgeable surrogates to speak on her behalf. At this point, the search remained leak-free. Remarkably, the first time any news accounts mentioned Miers was just before Roberts was confirmed on September 29, and even then her name appeared only at the end of a long list of possibilities. But when Miers agreed to be considered on September 21, the search process essentially stopped.
Only over the weekend of October 1–2 did the White House begin notifying outsiders that Miers might be the choice. Like the president, Karl Rove played a less active role in the selection of the second justice. Heavily involved in trying to handle the fallout from Katrina, he was facing an additional problem. During September, the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s criminal investigation into the leak of CIA official Valerie Wilson’s name had reached a critical stage; Rove faced the real possibility of being indicted.
So it was not until Sunday, October 2, that Rove fully engaged with the nomination process. His first call—which revealed whose opinion really mattered—was to James Dobson, the founder and leader of Focus on the Family, to tout Miers’s credentials. Rove assured Dobson that Miers was an