After Miers: Bush Needs to Reunite His Base

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Bush’s abandonment of Harriet
Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court, just as his Republican supporters in Congress
were coming to her defense against the Christian
right, can only deepen the divide in Congress and
among the staunch supporters of the Reagan revolution.
Even such conservative icons as Robert Bork and Rush
Limbaugh implored the president to drop Miers.

Already the older Reagan stalwarts have constituted a
rising chorus of complaint against Bush over the war.
In a speech yesterday at the Bill Clinton School of
Public Policy in Little Rock, John Danforth, a
former Republican senator from Missouri and an
Episcopal priest, said, “I think that the Republican
Party fairly recently has been taken over by the
Christian conservatives, by the Christian right,” he
said in an interview after his talks. “I don’t think that this is a
permanent condition but I think this has happened, and
that it’s divisive for the country.”

James Dobson, the popular right-wing evangelical
pastor sought to staunch the attacks against Miers,
saying Karl Rove had assured him she was okay on
Christian values. Here is what he said in his October 11 radio broadcast:

“Karl Rove had shared with me her judicial philosophy,
which was consistent with the promises that President
Bush had made when he was campaigning. Now he told the
voters last year that he would select people to be on
the court who would interpret the law rather than
create it and judges who would not make social policy
from the bench. Most of all, the president promised to
appoint people who would uphold the Constitution and
not use their powers to advance their own political
agenda. Now, Mr. Rove assured me in that telephone
conversation that Harriet Miers fit that description
and that the president knew her well enough to say so
with complete confidence.”

But yesterday, the tide of criticism against Miers
continued to rise, with warnings that young Bush could
follow his father into oblivion. Father Bush earned
Republican ire by raising taxes. “She’s 60-years-old
and has never written anything important,” Phyllis
Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum, said of Miers in a

recent speech at Harvard. “I don’t buy this idea of
just trusting the president. Millions of people voted
for Bush solely because they believed he would change
the direction of the court away from judicial
activism. They feel betrayed.”

So who’s up next? Bush has to pick someone. It’s likely back to basics:
he can ingratiate himself across the conservative
divide by naming an established right-wing jurist to
the Supreme Court. Some already have backed out, but
with a little arm-twisting, who knows?

In the early summer, a list of possible candidates for the court included:

Others:

And in the distance: