Wall Street Opinion Journal John Fund Thursday, October 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Harriet Miers’s nomination resulted from a failed vetting process.

“There’s a standard vetting process that we go through with all nominees.”–White House spokesman Scott McClellan

“The president is very, very confident in his judgments about people, and he likes to reward loyalty.”–Brad Berenson, an associate White House counsel in the first Bush term.

The vetting of Harriet Miers leaves questions that demand answers, not more spin or allegations that critics are “sexist” or “elitist.” It was so botched and riddled with conflicts of interest that it demands at a minimum an internal White House investigation to ensure it won’t happen again.

Wall Street Journal John Fund Monday, October 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

I have changed my mind about Harriet Miers. Last Thursday, I wrote in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary that “while skepticism of Ms. Miers is justified, the time is fast approaching when such expressions should be muted until the Senate hearings begin. At that point, Ms. Miers will finally be able to speak for herself.”

But that was before I interviewed more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues along with political players in Texas. I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now–and loudly–because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. “She is unrevealing to the point that it’s an obsession,” says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.

White House aides who have worked with her for five years report she zealously advocated the president’s views, but never gave any hint of her own. Indeed, when the Dallas Morning News once asked Ms. Miers to finish the sentence, “Behind my back, people say . . .,” she responded, “. . . they can’t figure me out.”

Wall Street Journal October 11, 2005; Page A16

The world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers in coming weeks, so we’re not going to join the pack already chasing her back to Texas. But one strategy that the White House would be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion of both her religion and her personal views on abortion.

In case you haven’t heard, Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian who is personally opposed to abortion. A main White House talking point is that she fought to reverse the American Bar Association’s position supporting abortion rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink — that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers. And James Dobson of Focus on the Family has endorsed her because, he says, “I know the individual who brought her to the Lord” and because “I do know things that I am not prepared to talk about here [on TV].”

We’ll concede that Mr. Dobson’s sources upstairs are better than ours. But whatever he knows, if it concerns Ms. Miers’s religion it doesn’t tell us anything about how she’ll rule on the Supreme Court. Allow us to recall the case of Anthony Kennedy.

Human Events Patrick J. Buchanan October 3, 2005

Handed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to return the Supreme Court to constitutionalism, George W. Bush passed over a dozen of the finest jurists of his day — to name his personal lawyer.

In a decision deeply disheartening to those who invested such hopes in him, Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren.

This is not to disparage Harriet Miers. From all accounts, she is a gracious lady who has spent decades in the law and served ably as Bush’s lawyer in Texas and, for a year, as White House counsel.

But her qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent. She is not a brilliant jurist, indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or public forum. Were she not a friend of Bush, and female, she would never have even been considered.
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