Questions about Harriet Miers, Plame, Guantanamo

Adele Stans, one of the most inquisitive and witty of American Prospect's columnists, raises some questions about Harriet Miers:

...[Bush] has named a staff member who was likely privy to the most confidential of material as other White House staffers planned their leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. When columnist Robert Novak outed Plame in July 2003, Miers had just ascended to the post of deputy chief of staff for policy from a two-year stint as Bush’s staff secretary, “the person in charge of all the paperwork that crosses the president's desk,” according to a description of Miers’ duties published on the conservative Web site NewsMax last year...

...Miers has been a key player in Bush’s two Supreme Court search efforts. She was deeply involved in the choice of John Roberts, just sworn in as chief justice, and was presented to the Senate, in Cheney-esque fashion, as the president’s point person conducting the search for the person to fill the position for which she has just been nominated. Prospect readers will recall that, even as he interviewed at the White House for his nomination, Roberts rendered a decision in the administration’s favor regarding the U.S. internment of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. One has to wonder what Miers’ role was in the Roberts interviewing process. Was she aware of the Guantanamo case? (It’s hard to imagine that she was not.)...

...As more is revealed about Miers, it will become obvious that the issues of concern with regard to her nomination have little to do with her lack of judicial experience, or even her enigmatic personal ideology, but rather with the very political nature of her White House record....

Comments

[bobski]

The lack of judicial experience is not necessarily considered a minus by many of us, but...

Meirs is to Bush what Abe Fortas was to LBJ and for that reason alone she is unqualified to sit on the court..

[PW]

I don't have a problem with the lack of judicial experience -- some of the best justices etc. etc. But I do have a problem with the kind of narrow experience she's had and with her relationship to probably the most corrupt White House anyone can remember.