WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Harriet Miers took her name out of consideration for the Supreme Court on Thursday amid a brewing showdown over White House documents. But some lawmakers and observers suggest that the impasse was simply the most graceful exit possible for a floundering nominee.
Miers never served as a judge and her critics said her background as an attorney, a former head of the Texas State Bar Association and as a Dallas city council member provided few clues to her judicial philosophy.
Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had asked for documents she had worked on as the White House's top lawyer. The president refused, calling the request "a red line I'm not willing to cross."
This is how the political spin-meisters work overtime. Now that Miers has withdrawn her name from the court, the big question of why she was forced out is taking shape over a controversy of the Senate Judiciary Committee asking for documents Miers worked on as White House legal counsel. Even Meirs and Bush are putting their spin in this document controversy. Here's what Miers said:
In a letter to the president on Thursday, Miers said she was concerned that she would be called upon to testify about her service as White House counsel, which she said would jeopardize the independence of the Executive branch.
"I am concerned that the confirmation process presents a burden for the White House and its staff and it is not in the best interest of the country," she wrote.
President Bush's response to the document controversy is just as fun:
In a statement issued by the White House, Bush said, "It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel."
I'm sorry, but this is all a bunch of smelly, political BS.
Miers was scuttled because she was the ultimate stealth candidate. Nobody knew anything about her, nor was there any paper trail that could allow senators to get some sense of her judicial philosophy and ideology. She was a corporate lawyer, and a personal lawyer for President Bush. She was not a judge. In fact, the only qualifications that Miers seemed to have was that President Bush liked her and thought that she'd make a great Supreme Court justice. Liberals and Democratic Senators couldn't decide how she'd vote on the big issue of Roe verses Wade, any more than the conservative and Republican senators. In fact, the conservatives and right-wingnuts were worried that Miers wasn't too conservative for their tastes. The wingnuts feared she'd become another David Souter--a Supreme Court justice picked by a Republican president, who would shift his ideology to an opposite view. In the past three weeks, you didn't hear the Democrats complaining about Miers--the complaining was going on with the right-wingnuts. And since there was almost no documentation to study and examine regarding Miers' judicial philosophy, this amplified the criticisms coming from the right. There were other problems as well--questions of Miers finances, her work on the Texas State Lottery Commission, her problems with paying state bar dues, her botched questionnaire, her flubbed answers in meetings with the senators, and the latest scandal coming out with the Washington Post publishing an old speech that Miers gave regarding abortion. But all these little problems simply confounded and amplified the fact that Miers was a complete unknown. There was no scholarly or judicial record that the Senate, the Washington press corps, and the public could examine and review. And had there been some type of judicial record that Miers could lean on, some of these other smaller problems may not have become as prominent. President Bush went too far in selecting a stealth candidate, and it backfired on him. Miers was going to get shot down--either before or after the confirmation hearings.
So with the Miers candidacy sinking, and adding some other scandals plaguing the Bush administration (We all know of them--Valerie Plamegate, the Iraq War, FEMA, energy prices), what is the White House suppose to do? Pull Miers' nomination and come up with an acceptable politically-correct answer. Senate Republicans were demanding White House documents of which Miers worked as legal counsel. The Republicans wanted those documents to determine what Miers judicial philosophy was like (And the Senate Democrats would certainly also want to see them as well). The White House was certainly going to refuse releasing those documents--they weren't going to release John Roberts' papers when he worked as solicitor general during the first Bush administration, do you think they're going to release documents regarding Miers' work? Guess what? We've got the perfect scapegoat reason for withdrawaling Miers' name. The Senate demands documents that the White House refused to give up, so Miers is scuttled. Consider this:
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, suggested in a column in last Friday's Washington Post that the White House press the documents issue as a face-saving way to withdraw the nomination.
"That creates a classic conflict, not of personality, not of competence, not of ideology, but of simple constitutional prerogatives: The Senate cannot confirm her unless it has this information. And the White House cannot allow release of this information lest it jeopardize executive privilege," he wrote.
Just remember, this is all a bunch of political BS.
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