WASHINGTON – Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ footprints on contentious social issues suggest a moderate position on gay rights, an interest in advancing women and minorities, and sympathy for anti-abortion efforts. Judging from the Smith &Wesson she once packed, she favors gun rights as well.
Miers’ years as a corporate lawyer and White House insider have produced a record so scant that court watchers are picking through 16-year-old Dallas City Council votes to divine how she might come down on constitutional matters.
She is not a completely blank slate.
A decade before the 2001 terrorist attacks, Miers defended constitutional freedoms in a time of danger with words that would hearten two groups of activists in the post-Sept. 11 world of added police powers – civil libertarians and the gun lobby.
“The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts,” she wrote in Texas Lawyer when she was president of the state bar.
“Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble … access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance.
“We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs.”
Miers once owned a .45-caliber revolver, a gift from a brother who was worried about her safety when she lived alone in Dallas, said Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, who has known Miers for 30 years and has dated her.
The judge recalled one Sunday afternoon driving out to the country, setting up tin cans on a dirt road and trying to teach Miers how to shoot.
How was her aim?
“She was terrible,” said Hecht, who added that she kept the gun for a long time but said he was unsure if she ever fired it again.
In her writings, Miers has pitched a brand of criminal justice that borrowed from the right and the left. On one hand, she insisted, “Punishment of wrongdoers should be swift and sure,” and she appeared to have little patience with those who would excuse an act of violence by blaming society.
On the other hand, she pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime – poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction – must be addressed.
On the issue that commands the most attention for court nominees, Miers pressed unsuccessfully to have the American Bar Association put its policy in favor of abortion rights to a vote of the membership, showing a sensitivity, at least, to the anti-abortion movement, if not outright support of it.
Miers bought a $150 ticket to a Texas anti-abortion group’s fund-raising dinner in 1989, the year she won a term on the Dallas City Council, the group’s president said. Kyleen Wright of the Texans for Life Coalition, then called Texans United for Life, said the dinner drew about 30 other officeholders or candidates as “bronze patrons,” the lowest level of financial support.
In 1992, Miers said presidents have no business asking court nominees to toe their line on abortion.
“Nominees are clearly prohibited from making such a commitment, and presidents are prohibited from asking for it,” she said. People who think such inquiries are proper show “a misunderstanding of the separation of powers by proposing that judicial nominees should mirror a president’s views.”
In one of the few head-on expositions of her views on public policy, a short gay-rights survey she filled out during her city council campaign in 1989, Miers backed equal civil rights for homosexuals and spending on AIDS education while defending a Texas law – since overturned by the Supreme Court – that made gay sex a crime.
Despite that paradox, a leading gay-rights group credited her Tuesday with an open mind.
“It’s only a small window into her thinking,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “But it certainly, for me, raises the possibility that she’s more fair-minded than our opponents are hoping.”
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