Harriet Miers: One of Us
Patrick Ruffini
In SCOTUS
Chuckie and Harry are in for a cold, rude awakening when the paperboy tosses tomorrow's Times over the fence:
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"She decided that she wanted faith to be a bigger part of her life," Justice Hecht, who now serves on the Texas Supreme Court, said in an interview. "One evening she called me to her office and said she was ready to make a commitment" to accept Jesus Christ as her savior and be born again, he said. He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Ms. Miers and Justice Hecht "prayed and talked," he said. ...
Ms. Miers, born Roman Catholic, became an evangelical Christian and began identifying more with Republicans than with the Democrats who had long held sway over Texas politics. She joined the missions committee of her church, which is against legalized abortion, and friends and colleagues say she rarely looked back at her past as a Democrat.
"There weren't that many Republicans in Texas in those days," said Merrie Spaeth, a director of media relations at the White House under Ronald Reagan who met Ms. Miers after moving to Dallas in 1985. "Harriet is what you would call a Southern lady. It is marvelous to watch her in meetings with huge egos, where she allows people to think good results are the product of their own ideas."
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The Court has seen its share of conservatives, but religious conservatives have been underrepresented. This could well be changing:
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In an interview Tuesday on the televangelist Pat Robertson's "700 Club," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the Christian conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said Ms. Miers would be the first evangelical Protestant on the court since the 1930's. "So this is a big opportunity for those of us who have a conviction, that share an evangelical faith in Christianity, to see someone with our positions put on the court," Mr. Sekulow said.
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Miers on life:
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Religion appears to have influenced her views on certain subjects. In a discussion with her campaign manager in 1989, Ms. Miers said she had been in favor in her younger years of a woman's right to have an abortion, but her views evolved against abortion, influenced largely by her born-again religious beliefs, said Lorlee Bartos, a Democratic campaign consultant in Dallas who managed Ms. Miers's City Council campaign.
"She was someone whose view had shifted, and she explained that to me," Ms. Bartos said.
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Reading this, there seems to be nothing watered down about Ms. Miers' association with Valley View Christian, down to her embrace of a splinter group that's forming a new church to maintain its traditional forms of worship. (No hidden blueblood tendencies here.) In terms of pure bio, Miers seems to be more in tune with the rank-and-file conservatives than a legal elitist with a Cambridge or New Haven address who's never written a contract.
The lawyer types round these parts need to remember: Outcomes over Process.
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