More on Harriet Miers

More David Frum on the Miers nomination. Very interesting and rather bad for Miers info, including:

More talking over the weekend to more conservative lawyers in Washington. It is hard to convey how unanimously they not only reject, but disdain, the choice of Miers.
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Another told me of a briefing session to prepare Miers to enter into her duties as White House Counsel. A panel of lawyers who had served in past Republican White Houses was gathered together. After a couple of hours of questions and answers, all agreed: "We're going to need a really strong deputy."

It's been reported the reason Miers was named White House Counsel in the first place was that she had proven incompetent as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. Her boss, Chief of Staff Andy Card, badly wanted to get her out of his office - but couldn't fire her because she was protected by the president and the first lady. So he promoted her instead. Now we learn that it was Card who was the strongest advocate of moving Miers out of the West Wing altogether and onto the high court - raising the question of whether the ultimate motivation for this nomination is to open the way to hiring a new Counsel by kicking a failed Counsel upstairs.

Frum also includes the transcript from a Ken Starr interview on Hannity and Colmes last week.

Frum says:

Starr in other words sounds to me like somebody who has been deputized to go on television and find something good to say - and who is searching for a way to be kind without saying anything affirmatively untrue. So, as Ann Coulter mockingly puts it, he emphasizes "how nice, tidy, helpful, and prompt" Miers is.

Two people who supported Miers last week and have now changed their minds are John Fund and PoliPundit.

Here is what John Fund has to say, at Opinion Journal (Via Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO):

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."

Read the rest here.

And here is PoliPundit's new take on Harriet Miers (Via John Podhoretz at NRO):

Since her nomination was announced, I’ve said that Harriet Miers should be confirmed to the Supreme Court, despite her unexciting qualifications, because she’s a conservative. Information that has come out over the last week has caused me to believe she is not a conservative. So I’m changing my position: Harriet Miers should not be confirmed by the Senate.

On Roe v. Wade, I have no doubt that Miers is a rock-solid pro-lifer. If this were the only issue that mattered, then Miers would have my full support.

But there are any number of other issues before the Court, foremost among them the racial discrimination that goes on in the name of affirmative action. On these issues, Miers would at best be a squishy liberal like Justice O’Connor.
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Miers is a documented supporter of “diversity,” a codeword for racial discrimination. She seems to have helped create the White House’s split-the-baby position on this issue in the University of Michigan cases in 2003, that helped keep affirmative action legal.

Harriet Miers is Alberto Gonzales in a dress. I would not support the confirmation of Gonzales; so why should I support the confirmation of Miers?
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But those conservatives who disagree with me need to prove that Harriet Miers has demonstrated the sort of prickly independence that keeps, say, a Justice Clarence Thomas, squarely in the conservative camp despite years of liberal pressure. Everything I’ve read and heard about Miers tells me that she does not possess anything like the ability to resist the inevitable pressure to move towards O’Connorism once she’s installed on the Court.

Read the rest here.