[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

Naughty Harry: Lawyering without a License
    By Maureen Dowd
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 19 October 2005

    I was just coming to grips with the idea that
a Supreme Court nominee doesn't need to have any
experience for the job.

    Now it turns out that a Supreme Court nominee
doesn't even need to always be a lawyer in good
standing.

    Harriet Miers shared a little secret about
herself on her application to be an associate
justice: "Earlier this year, I received notice
that my dues for the District of Columbia bar
were delinquent and as a result, my ability to
practice law in D.C. had been suspended."

    Did that little dog on the birthday card she
sent W. eat her dues?

    Ms. Miers, then the White House counsel,
remedied the situation after she got the letter.
But weren't the Bush spinners making a case for
her by reporting that she was really great at
managing the paper flow when she was the
president's staff secretary?

    Now we discover that she could be such a
scatterbrain about paperwork that a little tiny
thing like being able to legally practice law
slipped her mind while she was serving as the
lawyer for the leader of the free world?

    There was another odd, unfocused episode with
the Republican senator Arlen Specter this week.
He said that he and Ms. Miers had talked
privately on Monday and that she had expressed
support for two Supreme Court rulings that
established a right to privacy and are viewed as
the foundation for Roe v. Wade.

    Before Ms. Miers could even forget her bar
dues again, the White House said that Senator
Specter was mistaken, and Ms. Miers called to
tell him so. Mr. Specter was willing to say he'd
misunderstood, and will surely want to clear all
this up in the hearings.

    But maybe he'll wind up sticking by his
earlier statement: "She needs a crash course in
constitutional law."

    The White House gambits to soothe the wrath
of the right and flesh out the views of Ms.
Miers, in lieu of an actual judicial record, are
creating more confusion. In order to sell her,
officials had to expose her by sending her
anti-abortion positions from 1989 to the Senate
Judiciary Committee.

    She's on record as favoring one of the most
restrictive positions on abortion: "actively"
supporting a constitutional amendment to make
abortion illegal except when the mother is
actually about to die (never mind if her health
might be severely impaired or she's a victim of
rape or incest).

    When she was running for City Council in
Dallas, Ms. Miers answered yes to all the
questions from Texans United for Life, an
anti-abortion group, elaborating on only one:
whether she would vote to keep anyone who
supported abortion rights out of city jobs
dealing with health issues. After saying yes, she
added "to the extent pro-life views are
relevant."

    "The answers clearly reflect that Harriet
Miers is opposed to Roe v. Wade," Senator Dianne
Feinstein of California said. "This raises very
serious concerns about her ability to fairly
apply the law without bias in this regard."

    With Karl Rove on grand jury watch and Dick
Cheney snugly tucked into his underground bunker,
W. and Andy Card are in control, and the West
Wing ineptitude is comic.

    First the White House tried to make Ms. Miers
seem more conservative by peddling her pedigree
as a member of an ultraconservative evangelical
church to its right-wing base. When injecting
religion into the hearings backfired, officials
started backpedaling and saying she shouldn't be
asked about her faith, even though the president
himself had said that her faith was a big part of
her appeal.

    Then when her draconian views on abortion
came out, the White House immediately tried to
assuage the left. The White House flack Scott
McClellan turned on his fog machine, saying, "The
role of a judge is very different from the role
of a candidate or a political officeholder."

    Mr. McClellan's answers about the
questionnaire were opaque, but were meant to
leave the impression that a Justice Miers might
view abortion differently than the candidate
Miers.

    That's very interesting, since the president
cited her constancy as one of her chief
attractions, implying, to quell conservative
worries, that she would not be another David
Souter.

    "I know her well enough to be able to say
that she's not going to change, that 20 years
from now she'll be the same person with the same
philosophy that she is today," W. said.

    Some Democrats who have interviewed her
recently have failed to see in her the
intellectual rigor that W. saw and find her
résumé so thin that it would not even earn a
"Heavy Hitter" profile in The American Lawyer
magazine. Answering the Senate Judiciary
Committee's questionnaire, she said that in her
two years on the City Council she dealt with such
weighty constitutional issues as ... zoning.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101905C.shtml