ConfirmThem

By Feddie Posted in SCOTUS — Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Per the request of CT's loyal readers, I am highlighting this article by the Chicago Tribune:

Conservatives had fought hard against Gonzales, long believed to be Bush's first choice, and they believed it had reaped dividends. In the week leading up to the Miers announcement, administration officials quietly assured some leading outside advisers that Gonzales would not be the pick.

"Conservatives will be happy," a White House official told one outside adviser on the night of Oct. 2, just hours after Bush had offered the job to Miers.

As word quietly spread that night, several recalled that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had offered similar assurances to Justice Clarence Thomas at a state dinner the night before Bush nominated John Roberts Jr. to the high court in July. Conservatives embraced Roberts, who was confirmed last month as chief justice.

Speculation quickly centered on Alito and Luttig, the two among those under consideration who would most closely match Roberts.

Owen seriously considered

Bush had emphasized to his aides, however, that he wanted to nominate a woman or minority. Federal appellate Judge Priscilla Owen had been under serious consideration and, an administration official said, was willing to endure another fight, after surviving a Democrat-led filibuster of her nomination to the New Orleans-based federal appeals court. She did not withdraw her name from consideration, the official said.

But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate Democrats had warned Bush that the nomination of the strongly conservative Owen would provoke an all-out fight and likely trigger a filibuster.

So with his approval rating dropping after the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush turned to Miers, his trusted adviser. Officials had floated the idea of nominating her with top outside legal advisers the week before, and they believed the Republican Party's conservative base would be content with her nomination.

Instead, it set off an immediate and intense backlash among conservatives who had hoped the White House would select a nominee with clearly defined views and the intellectual strength to move the Supreme Court to the right. Miers, they said, was not that nominee. The White House was forced into full damage-control mode, with Vice President Dick Cheney appearing on talk radio to defend the choice and Bush holding a news conference the next day.

But as White House officials and outside advisers began trying to shore up support among social conservatives, they angered other elements of the base offended by the suggestion that Miers' religious views or personal loyalty to Bush would cause her to vote the "right" way on the court.

Senior Republican aides in the Senate last week called the administration's failure to anticipate the controversy and its defense of Miers "monstrously bad" and "arrogant." One staffer of a leading Republican senator said the nomination dismantled years of work promoting the conservative legal philosophy that judges should be guided solely by the rule of law, not by their personal views.

Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee have long been frustrated by what they see as political missteps by the White House on judicial appointments, dating to Bush's first term, going through the filibusters and culminating with the "total disarray" of the Miers nomination, as one put it. Now, several noted, senators head into a weeklong recess with no strategy and no plan for talking to voters about Miers in their home states.

For Democrats, the filibuster of Estrada and other nominees was prompted partly by the bad blood that had developed with the White House over previous judicial nominations. But it also was always in part about the Supreme Court.

The Democrats were successful in part because neither new Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) nor top White House officials fully appreciated the consequences of not fighting harder against filibusters, according to Republicans involved in the process.

Former Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was ousted in late 2002 after making racially insensitive remarks, has criticized Frist for not moving more swiftly and forcefully on the issue when Estrada was first blocked, suggesting the situation could have been averted.

Lott now has refused to endorse Miers and said he could think of many more-qualified nominees. The Miers nomination also stoked simmering resentment among Senate Republican staffers, who complained that the White House had long failed to grasp the politics of the confirmation process and unnecessarily alienated Democrats.

`Zilch' on `good' confirmations

"The administration has acted as if the president's job is nominations, not appointment," said an aide to a top Republican senator. "They've made the base happy with lots of good nominations, but they have done zilch to get them confirmed."

White House officials respond that they mounted a strenuous defense of the filibustered nominees and ultimately got many of them confirmed. And they noted that a great majority of Bush's nominees have been approved.

Even outside legal advisers said they felt rebuffed by White House officials after they tried to engage the administration on the filibuster issue. They had emphasized privately to the White House that the filibuster was a monumental threat to the president's authority to name judges of his choosing and urged Bush to become more directly involved.

But Gonzales, who then was the White House counsel, insisted the battle was a Senate issue.

"From the perspective of the White House, this is a matter-- an internal Senate matter to be resolved within the Senate," he told the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings as attorney general.