[Mb-civic] Conservatives Confront Bush Aides - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Conservatives Confront Bush Aides
Anger Over Nomination of Miers Boils Over During Private Meetings

By Peter Baker and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 6, 2005; Page A01

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday 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 résumé 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." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he 
take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in 
the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers.

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. While conservatives at times 
have assailed some Bush policy decisions, rarely have they been so 
openly distrustful of the president himself.

Leaders of such groups as Paul M. Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and 
the Eagle Forum yesterday declared 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,' 
" Lott 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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502200.html
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