Washington – President Bush on Tuesday defended his latest choice for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, from charges on the right that she is not sufficiently conservative and from charges on the left that she is a White House crony unqualified for the job.
The president also said he did not recall ever talking to Miers, whom he has known for more than a decade, about her personal views on abortion, and he reiterated that he was a “pro-life president” who nonetheless had no litmus test on the issue when selecting judicial candidates.
He insisted that Congress and the American public would come to be impressed with Miers, the White House counsel and a former president of the State Bar of Texas who was once Bush’s personal lawyer.
“I can understand people not, you know, knowing Harriet,” the president said in a 55- minute news conference in the White House Rose Garden, designed in large part to give Miers a boost as many conservatives remained agitated about the choice the day after she was named. “She hasn’t been, you know, one of those publicity hounds. She’s been somebody who just quietly does her job.”
The president added: “But when she does it, she performs, see. She’s not a person in Texas saying, ‘Look at me. Look at how stellar I have been.’ She just did it, and quietly, and quietly established an incredibly strong record.”
In an attempt to calm conservatives, Bush said three times that Miers would not change her philosophy, assuming she is confirmed, on the court.
“I know her well enough to be able to say that she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she’ll be the same person with the same philosophy that she is today,” Bush said.
The president appeared to be alluding to Justice David Souter, who was nominated by the first President Bush and who has disappointed Republicans looking for a reliable conservative on the court.
On Capitol Hill, Miers again met with senators crucial to her confirmation.
Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican on the Judiciary Committee and a leading opponent of abortion rights, said he might vote against confirming Miers, depending on what she says in her hearings.
“There is a lot of skepticism around about her,” Brownback said, recalling the conservative disappointment with Souter, who ruled for abortion rights and with the majority in other liberal decisions. “If it really appears as if and operates as if she is a Souter type of nominee, I can see a scenario that I would vote against her on the committee.”
Another Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who met with Miers on Tuesday, said he would support her and expected other Republicans to ultimately do the same.
Many social conservatives also reacted with alarm Tuesday to news reports that as a City Council candidate in Dallas in 1989, Miers told a gay group that she supported equal civil rights for gays and lesbians, although she did not support the repeal of a local ban on sodomy.