Another Miers Fiasco

As if this SCOTUS nomination hasn't had enough of them over its first two weeks - from nominating someone so unqualified, to nominating someone without a known judicial philosophy, to carpeting bombing its own loyal core supporters when they had the temerity to object to this Bush's "read my lips" moment - the White House has bumbled, bungled, miscalculated, and lashed out every step of the way, avoiding with fingers jammed in ears and loud humming emitting from its mouth the one piece of sound advice it has gotten since October 3rd: withdraw the Miers nomination and substitute a bona fide constitutionalist in its place.

I left out an additional slice of idiocy - playing up her religious faith in a cynical attempt to dupe evangelical leaders to flack for her and her White House sponsors - which did nothing to mobilize an evangelical "rank & file" that is proving it is no monolithic demographic by turning more and more against the nomination. Well, those chickens are already coming home to roost.

Even as the White House reshuffles strategies yet again and tries to put over the manifest joke that this woman is "experienced" and "qualified" to sit on the highest court in the land, a heretofore undisclosed conference call with some of those very same evangelical leaders may cost dear Harriet and her sponsors the one thing they had to have to carry her to Senate confirmation: Democrat support.

Remember Dr. Dobson's slip of the tongue on October 5th?

Two days after President Bush announced Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, James Dobson of Focus on the Family raised some eyebrows by declaring on his radio program: "When you know some of the things that I know - that I probably shouldn't know - you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice."

Remember how we all wondered how he came to "know some of the things that he probably shouldn't have known"? And how Dr. Dobson tried to last week to clean up the PR mess he made?

[D]r. Dobson quelled the controversy by saying that Karl Rove, the White House's deputy chief of staff, had not given him assurances about how a Justice Miers would vote. "I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade," [D]r. Dobson said last week. "But even if Karl had known the answer to that - and I'm certain that he didn't because the President himself said he didn't know - Karl would not have told me that. That's the most incendiary information that's out there, and it was never part of our discussion." [emphasis added]

Keep the italicized passages above firmly in mind as you read the following graph:

It might, however, have been part of another discussion. On October 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which [John Fund] ha[s] obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends - both sitting judges - said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe. [emphasis added]

Why is this significant? Because these two sitting judges and other robed "close Miers friends" are being trotted out this week to help put over the President's "girl" as if she were Olivia Wendell Holmes. And their efforts on the White House's behalf didn't start today.

Oh, yes, who set up this conference call the day before the Miers nomination was unveiled?

Mr. Dobson says he spoke with Mr. Rove on Sunday, October 2, the day before President Bush publicly announced the nomination. Mr. Rove assured Mr. Dobson that Ms. Miers was an evangelical Christian and a strict constructionist, and said that Justice Hecht, a longtime friend of Ms. Miers who had helped her join an evangelical church in 1979, could provide background on her. Later that day, a personal friend of Mr. Dobson's in Texas called him and suggested he speak with Judge Kinkeade, who has been a friend of Ms. Miers' for decades.

What we have here is backroom maneuvering that would be worthy of the Clintons, but for the fact that the Bushies got caught. Think about this: the same Administration that raised hell over Dem attempts to impose an unconstitutional religious test on John Roberts tried to pre-emptively sell Miers to evangelicals on the basis of her religion before the nomination was even announced; the same Administration that admitted privately that it had no idea how Miers would rule on Roe (indeed, had never even discussed the prospect with her) insisted up and down, via these Texas surrogates, to evangelical leaders that she would vote to overturn it; and the same Administration that has been so insufferably proud of her "stealth" was evidently sufficiently aware of how poorly this nominee would go over with its own supporters that they sneakily tried to spill beans they don't even know if they have in order to put out the fire of conservative outrage before it could erupt.

Mr. Fund reports from these conference call notes that Dr. Dobson appeared to realize the underlying sleaze of the proceedings during the call and took the first excuse he could to bail out of it. And neither judge and "close Miers friend" is now willing to say much about it, one taking the "I don't recall" route and the other refusing to speak altogether.

I don't wonder, given what everybody connected with this "private" little telemeeting may have gotten themselves into:

Some participants in the October 3 conference call fear that they will be called to testify at Ms. Miers' hearings. "If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it," a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. "Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions," one participant told me.

That would, I think, qualify as the "Oh, [bleep]!" tipping point of the Miers nomination.

Imagine how the other party's base is looking at this: the President they absolutely, utterly, and insanely detest, about whom they are paranoid past the outer limits of dementia, selects the Invisible Woman to fill a critical swing seat on the Supreme Court, and then it comes out that he indirectly assured core backers that she would vote to, in their minds, ban abortion.

Does anybody seriously believe that every Donk senator on the Judiciary Committee, plus Chairman Arlen "Super-Duper Precedent" Specter, won't drill the living hell out of Miers? In addition to the tough questioning promised by skeptical Republicans, I might add. Or that the pressure from the Moore-ons and Kos-hacks for a filibuster won't be overpowering?

"She will have hearings like no nominee has ever had to sit through," Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline, told radio host John Batchelor. "One slipup on camera and she is toast."

And reports of her get-acquainted meetings on the Hill had the common theme of "appearing unwilling or unable to answer questions about her views on particular cases" and "little beyond banal chatter.” Imagine what the crucible of the Committee is going to be like - something, once again, that Miers has never experienced.

Should she survive the hearings, liberal groups may demand that Democrats filibuster her. Republican senators, already hesitant to back Ms. Miers after heavy blowback from their conservative base, would likely lack the will to trigger the so-called nuclear option.

"The nomination is in real trouble," one GOP senator told me. "Not one senator wants to go through the agony of those hearings, even those who want to vote for her." Even if Ms. Miers avoids a filibuster, it's possible Democrats would join with dissident Republicans to defeat her outright.

The Senate headcount keeps dwindling - even late last week it was in the 55-60 "yea" vote range, and now today that's down to 52, and the hearings are still three weeks away. The storm clouds are gathering above this President and his ill-considered SCOTUS choice like Katrina and Rita combined.

But instead of "evacuating" her and putting a known, experienced originalist in her place, and with their clumsy, clobberfooted, brainless, and dishonest base greasing that has imperiled any chance of keeping the Dems pacified, making maximum cultivation of Republicans - you know, all those "sexist elitists" - utterly critical, what does the White House do?

[T]he White House has also recruited New Hampshire politico Tom Rath to threaten to oppose the presidential bids of any senator who opposes Harriet Miers.

And what does the White House say?

Bush's friends contend that it is the conservative elite, not the President, who miscalculated and that self-righteous right-wingers stand to lose their seats at the table of power for the next three years. "They're crazy to take him on this frontally," said a former West Wing official. "Not many people have done that with George Bush and lived to tell about it."

Two weeks ago I entitled my first post on the Miers nomination "Bush Runs Away." I concluded that the President had cravenly ducked the filibuster showdown that he and the GOP Senate majority had been elected to take on. That he was afraid to fight.

I now see that I may have been in error. It isn't a fight per se that Bush fears - he's more than willing to wage war against his own supporters - it's a fight with the DisLoyal Opposition that terrifies him, either because it would violate his "New Tone" gospel or because he never meant to appoint constitutionalists (plural) to Olympus in the first place. In this scenario John Roberts was, in his mind, the fulfillment of his pledge to appoint "Scalias and Thomases," and now that that's been discharged, get ready for a steady stream of Souters or worse. Another "big thing" throwaway sop tossed to the GOP base to keep us quiet while, in most other areas he governed from the center or even the center-left.

This is not a conclusion I relish, or want to cling to by any means. But as the days go by and Dubya burns all his bridges to the Right, and continues touting Harriet Miers beyond all reason, even as her nomination steadily sinks into oblivion, it's becoming more and more inescapable that George Bush is willing to fight only for his friends - and not for the 62 million people who re-elected him.

How ironic that that wholly unnecessary distinction is the very petard on which "his girl" is being hoisted.