Washington – Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers left a mixed impression in one-on-one meetings Thursday with Senate Judiciary Committee members, raising the stakes for her upcoming confirmation hearing as the White House scrambled to defend Miers from a barrage of criticism from the right.
Making the rounds on Capitol Hill, Miers sought to reassure conservative Republicans who worry that she could become another David Souter, who was nominated by President Bush’s father but has proved a solid liberal vote on most issues.
One such skeptic, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., emerged unconvinced about Miers after his one-hour meeting with her.
“I want to see more information come forward,” he said.
Conservatives such as Brownback had hoped Bush would pick a nominee with unequivocal convictions on abortion, same-sex marriage and other hot-button issues, and whose vote could move the court decisively to the right.
Their problem with Miers is that, as the White House counsel and Bush’s former personal lawyer, she has left no trail of documents, judicial decisions or other evidence to suggest where she stands on any constitutional matter.
In a conference call, Bush loyalists tried to assure conservative activists that Miers would not disappoint them.
Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said the problem with Souter was that Bush’s father did not know him well when he nominated the judge in 1990, and that the justice surprised the White House with his leftist inclinations.
Miers’s close ties to Bush are the seed of many Democrats’ doubts about her. They suspect she may have been picked more for her loyalty to Bush over the years than for her intellectual heft or constitutional insights.
That makes Democrats as eager as Republicans to hear Miers expound on all sorts of matters – setting the stage for a confirmation hearing that could be far more revealing than the one conducted last month for Chief Justice John Roberts.
A Republican member of the committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said after meeting with Miers: “I think the hearings matter in her case probably more than others.”
Graham said Miers’ challenge will be to “create a comfort level” with conservatives that she shares their strict-constructionist approach to interpreting the Constitution, while convincing the public that she is not biased by her evangelical Christian faith and is qualified for the lifetime post, despite her lack of judicial experience.
