A president exposed for appointing unqualified political cronies to fill government jobs of unquestionable importance now has given the nation a Supreme Court nominee who is a political crony.
President Bush has used the same standard in assessing a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court as he did as a governor dispensing patronage: Fidelity to the cause of protecting and promoting George W. Bush.
The country knows almost nothing of Harriet Miers, whose first appointment from Bush came a decade ago when he named her to head the scandal-scarred Texas Lottery Commission. Now she is White House counsel, a political job to which she ascended after filling two others in the administration where her functions – among them, deputy chief of staff – included shielding the man in the Oval Office from adversity. Bush nominated her Monday to fill the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Miers may well turn out to be a brilliant jurist. We have no way of knowing, because she’s got not a day’s experience on any bench. Not even traffic court.
She undoubtedly is bright, hardworking and ambitious. No woman could succeed, as Miers did, in the rarefied, cutthroat – and sexist – society of top-flight law firms without smarts and a strategically sharp elbow.
But this nomination is not very much about Miers. It is all about Bush. The president continues to rely on an insular group of loyalists, rarely seeking advice, discussion – or even reading material – from outside the cocoon.
As indicated in the widely circulated comment by former Bush speechwriter David Frum last Thursday in his diary entry for the conservative National Review Online, Miers greatly admires the president.
And White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has told interviewers that Miers has been a White House favorite – as shown by her frequent invitations to Camp David. She is seen as “not having any agenda other than the president’s,” Card told Texas Lawyer magazine in 2003.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings also has praised Miers as “just extremely devoted to the president.” But don’t take their word for it. Take it from Miers.
In an online chat with the public conducted for the White House in October 2004, when she was deputy chief of staff for policy, Miers adroitly delivered political talking points to all who sought answers on education, the economy, tax cuts and terrorism. “We all know that on Sept. 11, 2001, we learned that there had been gathering dangers for the United States that would materialize in terrorist attacks,” she said. In fact, the White House had been warned repeatedly for months before the day of horror – beginning with a memo delivered days after Bush took the oath of office – that a catastrophic attack by al-Qaeda was likely. What we “learned” on Sept. 11 was that ignoring these alarms was deadly.
There is a certain cultishness that marks this administration.
Those unaware of just how rigorous the enforcement of purity would be have often ended their service with a woeful, and sometimes public, sigh. The roster includes former faith- based initiative czar John DiIulio, former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who famously described the president as “a blind man in a room full of deaf people.”
Of all the lessons of Hurricane Katrina, surely one is that it would have been better not to name a horse-show representative to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Not that Miers is obviously unqualified, as was former FEMA Director Michael Brown. No doubt she’s an accomplished lawyer. But there are thousands of them. And there are dozens of female judges on the federal bench appointed by Republican presidents. Miers leapfrogged over them not because she has a fine legal mind, but because she’s shown fealty to the boss.
Other presidents have named political friends to the high court – Lyndon Johnson’s choice of Abe Fortas comes to mind. Yet by the time he was elevated, Fortas was one of the top Supreme Court litigators, much like Bush’s first nominee, John Roberts. Miers has no such credential.
Her name goes forward as the pick of a president who is hunkered down with himself, and cannot be persuaded that his first duty is to the country.
