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Schlafly: President Bush's Women Are Pro Choice
President Bush's choice of Harriet Miers to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court is "a terrible disappointment and a missed opportunity,” Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly told NewsMax.com.
"We were expecting President Bush to move the Court away from an activist, supremacist Court toward a Constitutionalist Court and there is no evidence that Harriet Miers would be any better than Sandra Day O’Connor," said Mrs. Schlafly, widely credited as the woman who single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment at a time when it was considered certain to be ratified.
Some of those who know Harriet Miers say that she is strongly pro-life, but Mrs. Schlafly questions such assertions, observing that Miers has not taken any pro-life positions that she has heard of. "I don’t know of any pro-life positions that she’s taken. The one thing they say is that she contributed to a pro-life organization but that’s really dishonest; she bought a ticket to an annual dinner that all the politicians go to so they can be introduced – a $150 ticket - and I don’t call that something that would convince anybody that she’s pro-life.”
The real question she said, is "would she be a vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I don’t see any evidence of that. All the women around Bush are opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade – his wife, his mother, his Secretary of State, the [co-chair] of the Republican National Committee ... There is no woman around Bush who is in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade.”
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Asked if she thought Miers would be questioned about the subject when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mrs. Schlafly predicted that "she’ll be questioned but she won’t say anything. Roberts testified 20 hours and didn’t say anything.”
Miers’ lack of a paper trail concerns Mrs. Schlafly. "We should have a paper trail, something she’s written. Nobody knows anything she’s written that shows a strong philosophical commitment to the Constitution the way it was written. The job of a Supreme Court justice is to write opinions and what has she written? So how can we make a judgment?”
Should Miers handle herself well during the Senate confirmation hearings, Mrs. Schlafly considers it possible that it might soften conservative opposition. "It is possible that she might say something during the confirmation hearings that would make us believe she’s well qualified, but the thing is that when Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsberg he knew for sure she was a vote to uphold Roe v. Wade. And I think we were entitled to have a woman who would be the opposite of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. That’s why we elected George Bush.”
As for Miers’ qualifications for the Court, Mrs. Schlafly said "There are probably 100 lawyers in every big city who are just as qualified as she is. She really doesn’t have anything to recommend her except that she is a friend of George Bush.”.
Should she not perform well in the hearing, Mrs. Schafly said "it will be too late to do anything about it then,” admitting that it is most likely that Miers will be confirmed.
Noting that Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol has said he is hoping that the nomination would be withdrawn, she said that given the President’s stubbornness she thinks that would be unlikely.
Turning to the President’s role in the nomination, she said, "I find this thing of his saying ‘trust me’ offensive. We trusted Ronald Reagan and look what he gave us; we trusted Bush One and look what he gave us. Reagan gave us Kennedy and O’Connor and Bush One gave us Souter, so how can you trust them? I don’t think trust is a good argument.”
Responding to a NewsMax.com comment that once appointed to the Supreme Court justices tend to be seduced by the blandishments of Washington’s liberal intellectual community and in the words of the media "grow in office,” Mrs. Schlafly said she feared that this would be the case with Harriet Miers.
"They always seem to grow Left – they never seem to grow Right,” she observed. "To resist that, it takes a person with the intellect to resist it. Scalia and Thomas and Rehnquist all had the intellect to resist it."
Mrs. Schlafly said she thinks that Miers, on the other hand, will be another O’Conner: "roll back and forth, and then the commentators will say she’s the most powerful woman in America because we don’t know what she’s going to do – she’ll be the five to four vote one way one time and another way another time.
"Anyway, it boils down to a terrible disappointment and missed opportunity on the part of George Bush,” Mrs. Schlafly told NewsMax.com. Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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