The Nine [162]
Although the right tried to phrase its complaints about Miers as a matter of qualifications rather than of ideology, its sleight of hand amounted to little more than a pretense. In recent years, the Supreme Court had been populated exclusively with experienced appellate judges (despite Clinton’s hapless attempt to break the trend), but in the broader sweep of history Miers’s qualifications were hardly unusual. Lewis Powell had never worked in government and had, like Miers, served prominently in local and national bar associations; William Rehnquist had a routine civil practice in Phoenix, followed by his tenure as an assistant attorney general, heading the Office of Legal Counsel; Byron White spent even less time as deputy attorney general following an unremarkable career as a private lawyer in Denver. For the movement conservatives, the problem with Miers was not her lack of qualifications but their own lack of certainty that she would follow their agenda on the Court.
Still, Miers’s rocky debut on the national scene did not immediately doom her nomination. Harry Reid welcomed the choice, as did some Republican senators, like John Cornyn of Texas. On the Wednesday after she was nominated, Miers paid her first courtesy call on her home-state senator, and Cornyn embraced her publicly, playing a populist card on her behalf. She filled a “very real and important gap” on a Supreme Court dominated by Ivy Leaguers and Beltway intellectuals, he said after she left his office; he asked conservatives to “reserve judgment” and said that Miers had “ample qualifications” and was an “engaging person.” With few exceptions, senators did what came naturally: they refrained from making commitments one way or the other.
But the conservative rebellion was just starting. Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his predecessor, Ed Gillespie, attended a pair of gatherings of conservative activists in Washington, and both ran into a torrent of complaints about Miers. “For the president to say ‘Trust me,’ it’s what he needs to say and has to say, but it doesn’t calm the waters,” said Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform and the host of one of the meetings. “I told Mehlman that I had had five ‘trust-mes’ in my long history here,” Paul Weyrich, the host of the other luncheon, remarked, referring to the nominations of Stevens, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter as the others. “And I said, ‘I’m sorry, but the president saying he knows her heart is insufficient.’ ” When Gillespie told his group that there was a “whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism” about the complaints, he was nearly shouted down with demands that he apologize for the slur. Mehlman replied by citing Bush’s decade-long friendship with Miers: “What’s different about this trust-me moment as opposed to the other ones is this president’s knowledge of this nominee.”
This conservative outcry against Miers in October was nearly identical to the one against the possible nomination of Alberto Gonzales in July. As with Gonzales, Miers’s critics on the right could not point to any unacceptable positions that she had taken; also as with Gonzales, White House officials watched with astonishment a colleague they knew to be one of the most fervent conservatives on the staff portrayed as a closet liberal.
Facts played little part in the assault on Miers. The public statements about her, like those of her friend Nathan Hecht, suggested that she held views precisely in line with those who were most outraged by her nomination. The record of her single campaign for the Dallas City Council, while sparse, bore out Hecht’s summary of her views. In response to a questionnaire from Texans United for Life, Miers had said she would support a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, that she supported denying public funds to prochoice groups, and that she would use her office “to promote the prolife cause.” It was not enough. The conservative movement