Washington – Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers said in a speech more than a decade ago that “self-determination” should guide decisions about abortion and school prayer and that in cases where scientific facts are disputed and religious beliefs vary, “government should not act.”
In a 1993 speech to a Dallas women’s group, Miers talked about abortion, the separation of church and state, and how the issues play out in the legal system.
“The underlying theme in most of these cases is the insistence of more self-determination,” she said. “And the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes sense.”
In that speech and others in the early 1990s when she was president of the Texas Bar Association, Miers also defended judges who order lawmakers to address social concerns. While judicial activism is derided by many conservatives, Miers said that sometimes “officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: ‘I did not want to do that – the court is making me.”‘
Miers, who was one of the first women to become a partner at a major Texas law firm, also showed sympathy for feminist causes, referring to the “glass ceiling” faced by professional women and urging her audience to support female candidates. She recited a list of national and state female leaders that crossed the political spectrum, including Gloria Steinem, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
The speeches offer some of the clearest insights yet into Miers’ thinking on volatile social issues that can make their way to the high court.
Miers, the White House counsel, spent the majority of her career in private practice and has a limited public record on many topics – including abortion and affirmative action – that senators said they want to question her about at a confirmation hearing to begin Nov. 7.
In an undated speech given in the spring of 1993 to the Executive Women of Dallas, Miers appeared to offer a libertarian view of several topics in which the law and religious beliefs were colliding in court.
“The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual women’s (sic) right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion,” Miers said.
Those seeking to resolve such disputes should remember that “we gave up” a long time ago on “legislating religion or morality,” she said. And “when science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act.”
While the speeches may not be an accurate predictor of how Miers may rule as a justice, abortion rights opponents and advocates and legal analysts said Tuesday that Miers’ professed belief in self-determination could suggest that she favored a woman’s right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy.
Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said that while the words left room for varying interpretations, “one possible reading is that she believes you should basically give liberty the benefit of the doubt and that when moral issues are disputed and scientific evidence is unclear, government should stay its hand.”
Activists on both sides of the abortion debate said that Miers’ speech also appears to contradict a position she took just four years earlier, when she was running for the Dallas City Council.
