The Nine [161]
“Do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?”
“Absolutely,” said Kinkeade.
“I agree with that,” said Hecht.
The electronically assembled conservatives were mollified—for the moment.
News of the conference calls quickly leaked. The press attention spooked Kinkeade from further campaigning for Miers’s confirmation. Hecht was energized by it.
In the next week or so, Hecht gave more than 120 interviews on Miers’s behalf and proved to be a mixed blessing as an advocate. Hecht had served on the Texas court since 1988 and established himself as the most extreme right-wing voice on an already conservative court. He spoke often about Miers’s devout faith and her decision, late in life, to become baptized in his evangelical church. But his message was compromised somewhat by his ambiguous status in her life. Hecht’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings to reporters somehow provided both too little information—and too much. “We are good, close friends,” Hecht told the Los Angeles Times. “And we have been for all these years. We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that’s the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently.” Hecht’s vigorous and lonely advocacy raised the possibility that the only one the White House could find to endorse Miers was her boyfriend. (Hecht apparently had a complicated social life. He was also the sometime boyfriend of Priscilla Owen, his former colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, who had recently been confirmed to the Fifth Circuit and was a favorite of conservatives for the nomination that went to Miers.)
The absence of pro-Miers surrogates reflected the nature of her work for Bush, both in Texas and in Washington, as well as her personality. In Austin, Bush gave her the part-time job of supervising the state’s troubled lottery system, but her real work for him consisted of private legal counseling—not the kind of activity that produces a body of public accomplishments. Similarly, as staff secretary and then deputy chief of staff at the White House, Miers operated as a coordinator and traffic cop more than as an initiator of ideas. No one could testify to her views on constitutional law, because she had never been called on to have any. Even when Miers filled out her questionnaire for the Senate, listing the significant cases she had litigated, most of the trials were business disputes that settled. She had never argued a case in the United States Supreme Court or even in the Texas Supreme Court.
It quickly became apparent that the White House had no backup plan for pushing Miers’s nomination. Rove and the others figured that Hecht’s word would calm any conservative uncertainty, and Bush counted on the Republicans who controlled the Senate to fall into line, just as they had on every other issue for the past four-and-a-half years. Crucially, though, Bush failed to see that Iraq and Katrina had crippled his influence in Congress. The nomination of Miers reflected Bush’s arrogance, his sense that vouching for his personal lawyer would be all that was necessary to bring the Senate along. The president had miscalculated his own remaining clout—and the importance of the Supreme Court to his more