LA Weekly George can count on Harriet to overturn Roe v. Wade [View All]

[question everything]

OCTOBER 14 - 20, 2005

All in the Family
George can count on Harriet to overturn Roe v. Wade
by LOU DUBOSE

(snip)

Miers does have a record, even if it is not a public one. A highly regarded Republican Texas jurist has described Miers’ position on women’s reproductive rights as solidly anti-choice. A political consultant who ran Miers’ campaign for Dallas City Council places her on “the extreme end of the anti-choice movement.” The nondenominational evangelical Christian church Miers attends has been described by one of its former ministers as a “Bible-based congregation that is opposed to abortion.” But most importantly, as president of the Texas Bar Association, Miers campaigned very hard to end the American Bar Association’s support of a woman’s right to choose.

(snip)

There was more to Miers’ pioneering. Miers was the first female president of a state bar to campaign against the American Bar Association’s support of a woman’s right to choose. She ran her national anti-choice campaign without the backing of the bar association that elected her president. And she ignored the women’s lobby within her own state organization.

(snip)

There’s more context to Miers’ anti-choice philosophy. Miers is a member of an extended family of anti-choice candidates moved into public office by Karl Rove. The Texas Supreme Court is loaded with them. On that court, Justice Hecht was also romantically linked to Priscilla Owen. (It was Owen’s appointment to the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that almost destroyed the United States Senate last year.) Hecht and Owen were two of seven Rove candidates on the Texas court when Rove moved to Washington in 2000. Miers almost became number eight. When U.S. Senator John Cornyn left the court to run for attorney general in 1998, Bush considered appointing Miers to fill the vacant seat. “Everyone was excited about the prospect of a love triangle involving three justices,” said a lawyer working at the court. Bush made another appointment, judiciously avoiding the nation’s first Supreme Court pro-life ménage à trois. Miers followed Bush and Rove to Washington in 2000.


(snip)

The evangelicals would prefer a court-tested conservative such as Owen, the author of anti-abortion opinions on the Texas high court. Or perhaps Owen’s bench mate at the 5th Circuit, Edith Jones, who, as a federal appeals-court judge, declared that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jones is also known as “Judge No” on death-penalty appeals. And when a lawyer representing a woman in a sexual-harassment case reminded Jones that the defendant had groped her client’s breast, Jones responded: “Well, he apologized later.” She’s a right-wing Christian dream candidate, often said to be on Bush’s shortlist for the high court. So Bush could have picked better. There is a deep Republican bench filled with ideologues tested on the single issue that animates the religious right. But evangelicals have no reason to fear Harriet Miers. She’s with them in the pew. She’ll be with them on the bench.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/47/news-dubose.php

Lou Dubose is the author of several books, including The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress and Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Architect of George Bush’s Remarkable Political Triumph.