Washington – The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated Wednesday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president’s men during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.
A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not.
Over the course of several hours of sometimes-testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection – Bush called her “the best person I could find” – was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.
At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, several people in the room said, White House adviser Ed Gilles pie suggested that some of the unease about Miers “has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism.”
Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take his comment back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but “was talking more broadly” about criticism of Miers.
The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his party behind Miers and underscores that he risks a rupture with the Republican base of his presidency. While conservatives at times have attacked some Bush decisions, rarely have they been so openly distrustful of the president himself.
Columnist George Will decried the choice as a diversity pick without any evidence that Miers has the expertise and intellectual firepower necessary for the high court.
As the nominee continued to work the halls of the Senate, where the vote on her nomination will take place, the White House took comfort from the more measured response of the Senate Republican caucus and remained confident that most, if not all, of its members ultimately will support her.
Yet even some GOP senators continued to voice skepticism of Miers, including Trent Lott, R-Miss., who pronounced himself “not comfortable.”
“Is she the most qualified person? Clearly, the answer to that is ‘no,”‘ he said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
The persistent criticism has put the White House on the defensive ever since Bush announced Monday his decision to nominate Miers to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Con nor. While Miers has a long career as a commercial lawyer, Texas political figure and personal attorney to Bush before joining him at the White House, she has never been a judge or dealt extensively with the sorts of constitutional issues that occupy the Supreme Court.
Bush on Wednesday dispatched Gillespie, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman and presidential aide Tim Goeglein to meetings that regularly bring together the city’s most influential fiscal, religious and business conservatives.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and host of the other meeting, said there is widespread concern given the experience with the nomination of Justice David Souter, who proved more liberal once on the bench.
“There’s a great deal of frustration because of the Souter experience,” Norquist said. “The problem is there’s no fixing, there’s no allaying those fears. 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.”
While much of the consternation was voiced by social conservatives, the White House has trumpeted the support of such prominent figures as James Dobson, head of Colorado Springs- based Focus on the Family, and the National Right to Life Committee.
Explaining the reasons for his support, Dobson said on his Wednesday radio program, “She is a deeply committed Christian. She has been a believer in Jesus Christ since at least the late 1970s. I know the individual who led her to the Lord. I know the church she goes to. I know it is a very conservative church.”
He added, “I have talked at length to people who have known her a long time, 25 years. I trust these people.”
Dobson acknowledged conversations with Karl Rove, the president’s top political adviser, about the nomination but declined to disclose their contents.
