Doubts about Miers persisting within GOP
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 envoys 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 resume 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, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers “has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism.”
The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his own party behind Miers and underscores that he risks the biggest rupture with the Republican base of his presidency.
Leaders of such groups as Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation and the Eagle Forum declared Wednesday they could not support Miers at this point, while 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, 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,” contradicting Bush’s assertion. “There are a lot more people, men, women and minorities, that are more qualified in my opinion by their experience than she is. Now, that doesn’t mean she’s not qualified, but you have to weigh that. And then you have to also look at what has been her level of decisiveness and competence and I don’t have enough information on that yet.”
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’Connor. 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 tried to defuse the smoldering conservative revolt with a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday and the White House followed up Wednesday by dispatching 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.
Weyrich, who hosted one of the two private meetings, said afterward that he had rarely seen the level of passion at one of his weekly sessions. “This kind of emotional thing will not happen” often, Weyrich said.