Miers not an impressive choice

Editorial
The Daily Iowan

(U-WIRE) IOWA CITY, Iowa -  Last Monday, President Bush announced his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. If confirmed, Miers will no doubt have very big shoes to fill; the question is whether she's qualified to fill them, and the answer seems to be no.

As the replacement for O'Connor, a common swing vote on the court, Miers would fill a critical role. The court will soon decide cases concerning abortion and privacy matters, assisted-suicide issues and government policies in the war on terror. In order to determine Miers' aptitude, there must be a thorough investigation of her experience and judicial philosophy. And this may be difficult.

It's true that Miers' resume is filled with superlatives: She was the first female president of the Dallas Bar Association and the Texas Bar Association and also the first woman to head a prestigious law firm in Dallas. But as a corporate litigator representing big names, such as Walt Disney and Microsoft, Miers has no experience as a judge at any level of the courts.

Her resume contrasts starkly with Chief Justice John Roberts, who graduated from Harvard Law School, served as a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and had years of experience clerking for federal judges and the Supreme Court justice he eventually replaced. If Miers is confirmed, she will be the first justice in more than 30 years with no judicial experience. Moreover, those prior justices began as governors or senators or held positions requiring Senate confirmation––such as the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who served as a Justice Department official in the Nixon administration.

Miers, on the other hand, served as Bush's personal lawyer in the 1980s, followed him to Washington as a staff secretary, and eventually replaced Alberto Gonzales as White House council. Indeed, she is so close to the administration that she was a leader in its search for federal judicial nominees, before serendipitously bypassing many judges with longer resumes to be chosen to replace O'Connor.

Any person nominated for the highest court in the nation while having little background in constitutional law is questionable at best. Miers is going to have a much tougher time than Roberts affirming her commitment to the Constitution, with very little experience interpreting it.

Miers' public record might speak for itself, if there were a public record to speak of. She has never been a figure in the public eye, leaving little from which we could judge her views on critical issues. Her record on the Texas Lottery Commission isn't going to clue us in on much, so her public record says very little indeed.

Unlike Roberts- who was certainly well-qualified, if a bit mysterious- Miers does not seem to have the distinguished qualifications of a Supreme Court nominee. Her lack of judicial experience or a revealing public record does not help. As an insider of the Bush administration and the nominee chosen on a committee she helped team, everything seems rather fishy. In fact, The Los Angeles Times reported that White House insiders have dubbed Miers as President Bush's "work wife."

We are unsure what the First Lady thinks of this, but we are far from reassured.

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