Lou Dubose - George can count on Harriet to overturn Roe v. Wade

[realFedUp]

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

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

George Bush’s attorney Harriet Miers will almost certainly provide the swing vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and end a woman’s right to choose an abortion. If, that is, the Senate confirms her to serve on the Supreme Court. Because journalists are advised to avoid reporting the future, I hedge my bet with the qualifier “almost.” But it’s a prediction you can take to the bank — almost.

In appointing the lawyer he took to Washington with him, the president again demonstrates the brilliance of his political adviser Karl Rove, who helped move Miers from litigation to the political practice of the law. Miers never served as a judge. She has no paper trail that senators could use to predict what sort of justice she will be. The White House is refusing to release correspondence between Miers and her client George Bush. And despite her high-profile position as a partner at a Dallas law firm, she has a scant record of litigation. So there’s much the public and the Senate won’t know.

What they should know is that Miers is an anti-abortion-rights zealot, who, as we say in the South, is “keeping company” with a Texas Supreme Court justice who defines anti-abortion zealotry in Texas. Miers’ love interest, Nathan Hecht, anchors the right wing of one of the nation’s most conservative high courts. He is the Texas Supreme Court’s most vocal — and at times most reckless — opponent of a woman’s right to choose. He was the midwife to Miers’ born-again experience in 1979, when the two of them fell to their knees (in prayer) in Miers’ office at the Dallas law firm where they worked. Now, on orders from White House political operative Rove, he is selling Miers to the party’s evangelical Christian base. He’s not saying much about her record.

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.

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[Spiffarino]

1. Of course. Why else would he choose her?

He had to throw a bone to the bible-thumpers. Unfortunately for Bush, they're too stupid to realize that he can't appoint anyone who isn't a stealth candidate. That's why Dobson et al are running around to the fundie churches on their Harriet Miers "Trust Me" campaign. They've been given backchannel assurances from Bush that she's anti-choice.