I had a friend here the other day and we got into a conversation about the current situation with a vacancy on the Supreme Court and it led to me telling him about the Harriet Miers nomination from 2005. Most have forgotten about this, but now a cache of more than 50,000 documents related to that nomination are going to be made public by the National Archives in May.





As Washington is rapt by a Supreme Court standoff, the National Archives is preparing to release a trove of records pertaining to the last round of high court drama: President George W. Bush’s failed nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers in 2005. More than 56,000 pages of records relating to Miers’ nomination are scheduled to be made public in late May, according to a notice published by the Archives, which runs the Bush Library in Dallas. Bush nominated Miers on October 3, 2005, to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. However, Miers encountered strong opposition from conservatives, who questioned her qualifications and also worried that her record did not provide adequate assurance that she would fulfill conservative ideals on the bench. Less than four weeks after she was nominated, Miers withdrew. A few days later, Bush tapped 3rd Circuit Judge Samuel Alito, who was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice in January 2006 by a vote of 58-42.

The history of this is really quite interesting and I’d love to have access to those documents. Miers was President Bush’s personal attorney in Texas and he had appointed her to the Texas Lottery Commission, then took her with him to the White House as counsel. Because he was replacing Justice O’Connor, Bush was initially insistent that the nominee be a woman. The short list of conservative women at the time included judges like Janice Rogers Brown and Edith Jones, but Bush didn’t know any of them and didn’t know if he could trust them to remain conservatives once they had a seat on the Supreme Court. So he nominated Miers instead.

The response in the Senate was not good, to say the least, and much of the criticism came from Republicans. Miers did not have the kind of background and resume that we have come to expect for Supreme Court justices. Her law degree was from SMU, not an elite law school. She had never been a judge at any level. She had no track record of scholarship. In short, she was viewed as a legal lightweight. And it was Republicans who rejected her and forced her withdrawal, not Democrats.

I’ll be curious to see what comes of this release. I imagine authors like Jeffrey Toobin and Jan Crawford will dive into them and perhaps even write books about them, which I would look forward to reading.