Harriet Miers is certainly a mystifying choice to be a Supreme Court justice, reinforcing our belief that Bush’s main problem is his limited circle of friends. Maybe this is the reason she was chosen:
President Bush’s choice to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice and moderate abortion rights supporter Sandra Day O’Connor was a leader in an unsuccessful fight to get the nation’s largest lawyers’ group to reconsider its pro-abortion rights stance.
As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, Harriet Miers urged the national American Bar Association to put the abortion issue to a referendum of the group’s full membership. She questioned at the time whether the ABA should “be trying to speak for the entire legal community” on an issue that she said “has brought on tremendous divisiveness” within the ABA.
Miers was among a group of lawyers from the Texas bar and elsewhere who had argued that the ABA should have a neutral stance on abortion.
Social conservatives may be pleased by this, but my God, is she the best we can do? I see another Souter in this nominee.