Harriet Mier: Bush's One Right Thing?

The storm over Harriet Miers seems to be subsiding. Her biggest threat, it turns out, has been from loudmouth, self-satisfied powerbrokers like Bill Kristol who cannot relate to her, because, from all indicators, she doesn't play by their rules.

Ms. Miers is neither loud nor self-aggrandizing. She doesn't insult others or dismiss people with contempt. She, apparently, operates with that quality which is seldom seen among "real" people, and seems to have been surgically removed from those who seek power: humility. Focused on the details of her job, she is described as having an integrity we haven't seen from the "stars" of the Bush White House.

At least this is what Matthew Scully writes today in a New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled The Harriet Miers I know.

My personal opinion is that, given the staggering list of things President Bush has done wrong during his administration, it was just a matter of time before he had to get something right. And, just maybe, that something will be the choice of Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice.

He certainly has chosen incompetent people for important jobs. But worse than that, he has chosen arrogant people.

Some have been very good at doing their jobs because of that arrogance, when those jobs have been to pull the wool over the eyes of the electorate.

But others - like Donald Rumsfeld telling the Pentagon to ignore the 1200 page State Department report compiled by experts on how to avoid the debacle we now have in Iraq - have gone on, through arrogance, to compound mistakes tenfold through their combination of arrogance and ignorance.

Time will tell if Ms. Miers will prove to be a blessing for these United States. But, in the meantime, from Mr. Scully's description, I like her.

I don't think she'll obnoxiously and ingenuously argue there's no separation between Church and State in our Constitution because the signers wrote "in the year of our Lord" at the end, as another lawyer and political spokeswoman for the off-base insists.

We could have gotten that mentality, God help us.

Besides her humility and attention to facts, we could use a little civility. We could use a role model that argues using ideas, not insults, that relies on facts, not conjecture. I might even be inspired to clean up my own act a little bit, as much as I believe Rove, Rumsfeld, DeLay, et al have earned bonus cat calls.

One thing we need in politics and in the judiciary are people with integrity and grace. If Harriet Mier, indeed, has these qualities, she has my blessing.

And for a taste of Mr. Scully's opinions, read on. But careful, he might convince you that the top people in our administration are not really Republicans at all, but some sinister mutant variation - Neo-Conensis - because this guy is someone you really might find yourself liking.

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Excerpt from The Harriet Mier I Know by Matthew Scully

My friend David Frum expresses the general complaint when he asks, in his blog, when did Harriet Miers "ever take a risk on behalf of conservative principle? Can you see any indication of intellectual excellence? Did she ever do anything brave, anything that took backbone?" To translate: When all the big-thinkers were persevering year after year at policy institutes and conferences at the Mayflower Hotel, or risking all for principle in stirring op-ed essays and $20,000 lectures, where was Little Miss Southern Methodist University?

If four years observing the woman is any guide, the answer is she was probably doing something useful. But whatever she was up to, it's not good enough. Harriet Miers, says Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, is undoubtedly a well-meaning person, but he was expecting "brilliance," and her selection signaled "weakness" and "capitulation." Mr. Kristol also suggested how the Miers nomination could be withdrawn. In the tone of Michael Corleone laying out some general instructions, he said that with Ms. Miers out of the way, "the president's aides would explain that he miscalculated out of loyalty and admiration for her personal qualities," adding, "and he could quickly nominate a serious, conservative and well-qualified candidate for the court vacancy."

When it was Mr. Kristol's charming friend John Bolton whose fate was in question, that was family business, and for the president no price was too high for loyalty. But Harriet Miers, who is only the president's friend, is now to be led away like Carlo in "The Godfather" with his "ticket to Vegas." Quickly replace her with some credentialed luminary, and in a week no one will even ask where the woman is.

Overlooked in all this caviling is the actual ability and character of the person in question. Indeed, about the best quality to recommend Harriet Miers just now is that she is not at all the sort of person who goes about readily and confidently dismissing other people as third-raters, hacks and mediocrities. She has too much class for that.

It is true that Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X "our most urgent domestic priority," and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.

The accounts of the nominee's work habits are also true. But even better, when the lights went on at 5:30 a.m. or so in office of the staff secretary or the legal counsel, she was not starting the day with a scan of the newspapers in search of her own name. And all of us who leave our White House jobs and go on to write and trade on our service to the president could stand to learn more from Harriet Miers about service to a president. Whenever she was in the room, calmly listening and observing, you knew that on any matter, great or small, at least one person involved had in mind only the interests of the president, the office and the nation.

Surely the most pertinent conclusion to be drawn from Harriet Miers's low profile is that this is not a person susceptible to the charms of news media flattery. Already we have read suggestions that, should the next justice find a comfortable place in the liberal wing, the "O'Connor court" could well become the "Miers court." But I can assure the editorialists, too, that all such offerings to vanity will go untaken. They can save their catnip for the next nominee.

It may be, in fact, that a details person is just what the Supreme Court needs right now. If anyone can be counted on to pause in deliberations over abortion cases, for example, and politely draw attention to small details like the authority of Congress and of state legislatures, or the interests of the child waiting to be born, it will be the court's newest member. As a justice, however, she will command the kind of respect that has nothing to do with being conservative, or liberal, or anything else but a person of wisdom and rectitude.

Although it is conceivable that President Bush has had his fill of advice from overreaching pundits, that is not why he chose Harriet Miers. Maybe he didn't want somebody who had been planning for 20 years for a place on the Supreme Court. Maybe he has looked around every so often and noticed that the least assuming person in the room was also the most capable and discerning. Or maybe he remembered how the hardest-working person in the White House found time to prepare the will of a terminally ill 27-year-old colleague, and to spend nights and mornings staying with her and praying with her.

Whatever his reasons, what America got is a nominee of enormous legal ability and ferocious integrity, and in the bargain a gracious Christian woman only more qualified for her new role because she would never have sought it for herself. And in a few years, when the same critics we hear now are extolling the clarity, consistency and perhaps even the "brilliance" of judicial opinions, that's when you'll know it's the Miers court.

Matthew Scully, the author of "Dominion," was special assistant to the president and deputy director of speechwriting for President Bush from 2001 to 2004.