A judicial giant is not Miers’ desire

Q: What does Harriet E. Miers, a highly successful lawyer, longtime member of Valley View Christian Church in Dallas and confidante of the president of the

United States, want more than anything else?

A: The approval of the faculty of Yale Law School.

Or at least that is the fear among conservatives. They worry that although Miers is believed to be a pro-life evangelical conservative, she – like David Souter and Anthony Kennedy before her – will be seduced by liberalism.

As former Bush speechwriter David Frum noted after Miers had been nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, “The pressures on a justice to shift leftward are intense: the sweet little inducements – the flattery, the invitations to conferences in Austria and Italy, the lectureships at Yale and Harvard – that come to judges who soften and crumble.”

Ah, yes, the sweet little inducements: Washington dinner parties, laudatory editorials in the nation’s great liberal newspapers and, perhaps most important, praise from the smug savants back at dear old Yale or Harvard. Many leading lawyers never forget their roots in the Ivy League, where all-knowing professors throw laurels on judges who “get it” and scorn those who don’t. Forget Austria. It takes a very strong (or very principled) constitution to do without that intellectual flattery.

But perhaps that makes Miers the perfect candidate. Perhaps it takes someone who did not go to Harvard or Yale and never has seemed to care. Miers went to law school at Southern Methodist University, which, although a well-respected institution, was unlikely to have been a bastion of progressive thought when she entered the law school in 1970.

As a result, she likely avoided the flaying of conservative justices that would have been tattooed in the minds of most members of today’s Supreme Court. (Five of the nine justices, including Souter and Kennedy and the new chief justice, John Roberts, attended Harvard Law School. One, Clarence Thomas, went to Yale Law School.)

Nor did Miers enter the world of the East Coast establishment after law school. Instead of fleeing the conservative confines of Dallas for New York City or Washington, she joined a small corporate law firm and built a successful career as a corporate litigator. Unlike in New York, where verbalizing a pro-life viewpoint often leads to wrinkled brows and sad sighs (or worse), in Dallas, many of the “best people” are pro-life.

Frum, who worked with Miers in the early Bush years, opined in National Review Online: “Harriet Miers is a taut, nervous, anxious personality. It is hard for me to imagine that she can endure the anger and abuse – or resist the blandishments – that transformed, say, Anthony Kennedy into the judge he is today.”

Yet, this seems unlikely: Why would a lawyer who never has seemed to chase after fame or establishment intellectual credentials suddenly long for the embrace of the blue-state intelligentsia? Isn’t it more likely that her “taut, nervous, anxious personality” would not feel especially comfortable mingling in such a crowd?

Political analyst Larry Sabato estimates that a quarter of the Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century have “evolved” from conservative to moderate or liberal. There are many reasons why that may be, including what U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman of the District of Columbia Circuit once called “the Greenhouse effect” – a yearning for positive coverage by reporters such as Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times – or the desire to be termed a judicial giant by liberal historians.

But Miers’ colleagues repeatedly say she doesn’t care about any of that.

It is possible, of course, that she will “evolve.” That’s the risk in nominating anyone to the Supreme Court – particularly someone without a lengthy record on critical issues. Yet, the fear that Miers will turn away from the type of people she has surrounded herself with all her life (conservative Christians from Texas) so as to win an appreciative welcome at a Columbia Law School reception seems far less likely for Harriet Miers than for almost anyone else President Bush could have selected.