Washington – Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers assured a Senate Democrat on Monday that she has never told anyone how she would rule on abortion rights.
“Nobody knows how I would rule on Roe vs. Wade,” Miers said, according to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Still, Schumer and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the panel chairman, said Monday that they want to know more about a private teleconference call in which two of Miers’ friends reportedly assured religious conservatives that she would vote to overturn the 1973 case that legalized abortion.
Schumer said it was possible that the Judiciary Committee would subpoena participants in the call. The key issue: Whether the White House engineered a clandestine campaign to assure social conservatives that Miers would oppose abortion, while publicly insisting that it had no abortion litmus test in picking Miers.
Specter said committee staffers are investigating.
“If there was a telephone call where someone gave assurances about how she’s going to vote in a case, you bet that’s something we’d look into,” Specter said.
Early Monday evening, Specter, a moderate Republican who supports abortion rights, said that during a nearly two-hour private meeting, Miers told him that she believed the court had properly decided a precedent-setting 1965 privacy case.
That case, Griswold vs. Connecticut, established the legal foundation that led to Roe vs. Wade.
But after Specter’s comments made news, Miers called him to say she had not taken a position on that landmark case. Specter’s office issued a statement saying he “accepts Ms. Miers’ statement that he misunderstood what she said.”
Monday’s skirmishing over the teleconference call was set off by Wall Street Journal opinion columnist John Fund. He described a call among 13 members of “the Arlington Group,” which he described as “an umbrella alliance of 60 religious conservative groups,” on Oct. 3, the day President Bush nominated Miers.
During the call, James Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs evangelical group Focus on the Family, introduced two friends of Miers’ to speak about her, according to Fund.
White House political guru Karl Rove “suggested that we talk with these gentlemen because they can confirm specific reasons why Harriet Miers might be a better candidate than some of us think,” Dobson said, according to notes cited by Fund as taken during the call by one participant.
One participant asked whether the men thought Miers would vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
“Absolutely,” said U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of Texas.
“I agree with that,” said Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, a longtime Miers companion, according to Fund.
The call came one day after Rove spoke at length with Dobson about Miers, assuring the influential conservative that Miers was acceptable.
Miers told Schumer that she had never discussed Roe vs. Wade with Kinkeade or Hecht, Schumer said, but she refused to say whether she had ever discussed the issue with Rove.
