Harriet Miers, US President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, withdrew from consideration yesterday after Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who would’ve headed her Senate hearings, warned her he’d make her disclose her views of Supreme Court rulings on Muslim prisoners held in Guantanamo or otherwise in US custody, and those shipped away elsewhere.
Senators don’t say “Abu Ghraib.” But they’re talking torture.
Specter also cautioned Miers she’d have to guarantee that as a justice, she’d be independent of Bush and not give him “any special deference” on court cases.
What’s that mean, exactly? No “Get Out of Jail Free” card?
Specter’s threats of torture talk and to extract guarantees Miers would not use her office to assist the man she calls her “brilliant” boss finally succeeded where weeks of criticism of her judicial inexperience, disparagement of her legal skills, and skepticism over the genuineness of her conservative predisposition and religious beliefs failed.
It was a GOP coup. But it didn’t start out that way. In fact, Specter earlier assured the White House he’d help Miers pass the Judiciary Committee’s screening.
But that was before she turned in her homework.
Even Judiciary Committee staffers found Miers’ questionnaire responses so full of holes, they wondered: Is Miers applying to be considered as a justice, or making an origami spaghetti strainer?
If her dog didn’t eat her homework, it sure chewed it up.
Bad doggie!
Newsweek Magazine acknowledged Miers’ seeming conundrum of having to vet herself, since the White House counsel both selects and screens judicial nominees. But Newsweek also oddly rationalized Miers’ opaqueness, claiming that the counsel’s office, which Miers heads, was “stretched a bit thin this month” due to “other pressing matters — like digging up documents in response to multiple inquiries into Hurricane Katrina.”
Miers simply had no time to fill in the blanks.
Why not assign a White House intern weighty Katrina document retrieval tasks, in addition to the usual pizza deliveries? How urgent can Katrina paperwork be now?
“Hours after receiving the questionnaire,” Newsweek reports, “Committee aides were Googling for names and dates of cases that Miers had failed to provide.”
How helpful of the Judiciary Committee to finish Miers’ homework! Would they also have written her opinions if she’d ascended to the bench of the nation’s highest court?
It all became a bit too much for even the most loyalist Republican senators.
Tuesday’s weekly senate luncheon did Miers in. The New York Times reports the Republicans’ meltdown started when Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Judiciary Committee member who’d previously unequivocally supported Miers, suddenly announced he felt “uneasy.” Political centrist Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, then remarked he viewed Miers “with concerns.” And Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Judiciary Committee member, asserted that Miers needed “to step it up a notch” to pass muster. Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott confided other Senate Republicans were alarmed at Miers nomination but had “held their fire,” awaiting the hearings. And Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, warned, “There is an awful lot of Republican senators who are saying we are going to wait and see.”
Even Specter publicly suggested Miers needed a “crash course in constitutional law.”
Bush rallied the forces at a dinner the same day, insisting he supported Miers but would “protect the White House and the ability to operate.”
The late President Richard M. Nixon raised a similar dare when the Senate demanded he produce documents and tapes during the Watergate investigation and hearings. While some executive privilege certainly exists, its scope was limited by the Supreme Court that found the privilege far from absolute, and not to be arbitrarily determined by the White House. The court further held that Nixon’s White House could not claim Executive Privilege to insulate itself from criminal prosecution.
Bush implied he’d claim not only executive privilege but also attorney-client privilege because of legal work Miers did for him before his election and because of their continuing relationship. Bush made Miers White House counsel barely a year before he made her his Supreme Court nominee. Although she’s acted since 2001 as Bush’s “secretary,” overseeing every document and piece of paper that crosses his Oval Office desk, could their earlier attorney-client relationship remain in place at the White House and continuously insulate Bush?
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo’s prisoner abuse scandals may not be “another Auschwitz,” as conservative commentators point out.
But there need not be genocidal massacres to violate the Geneva Conventions, or raise allegations of crimes.
By Wednesday, the White House was dining on lame duck. The news arrived with breakfast Thursday morning-tea, toast, and the tube announcing we’d no longer have Harriet Miers to kick around anymore.
Watch out, though. That bad doggie of hers could still eat her homework.
