Judicial blank slate may not be so blank after all

updated 8:33 p.m. ET Oct. 4, 2005

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ footprints on contentious social issues suggest a moderate position on gay rights, an interest in advancing women and minorities and sympathy for anti-abortion efforts. Judging from the Smith & Wesson she once packed, she favors gun rights, too.

Miers’ years as a corporate lawyer and White House insider have produced a record so scant that court-watchers are picking through 16-year-old Dallas city council votes and the like to divine how she might come down on constitutional matters.

She is not a completely blank slate.

A decade before the 2001 terrorist attacks, Miers defended constitutional freedoms in a time of danger, with words that would hearten two groups of activists in the post-9/11 world of added police powers — civil libertarians and the gun lobby.

“The same liberties that ensure a free society make the innocent vulnerable to those who prevent rights and privileges and commit senseless and cruel acts,” she wrote in Texas Lawyer, when she was president of the state bar. “Those precious liberties include free speech, freedom to assemble ... access to public places, the right to bear arms and freedom from constant surveillance.

“We are not willing to sacrifice these rights because of the acts of maniacs.”

Former gun owner
Miers once owned a .45-caliber revolver, a gift from a brother who was worried about her safety when she lived alone in Dallas, says Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, who has known Miers for 30 years and has dated her.

“It’s a huge gun — he wanted to be sure she stopped the guy,” Hecht said in a telephone interview. The judge recalled one Sunday afternoon driving out to the country, setting up tin cans on a dirt road and trying to teach Miers how to shoot.

How was her aim?

“She was terrible,” said Hecht, who added that she kept the gun for a long time but said he was unsure if she ever fired it again.

Hybrid style of justice
In her writings, Miers has pitched a brand of criminal justice that borrowed from the right and the left. On one hand, she insisted, “Punishment of wrongdoers should be swift and sure,” and she appeared to have little patience for those who would excuse an act of violence by blaming society.

On the other hand, she pressed for more money to improve legal representation for indigent defendants and said root causes of crime — poverty, lack of mental and other health care, inadequate education and family dysfunction — must be addressed.

On the issue that commands the most attention for court nominees, Miers pressed unsuccessfully to have the American Bar Association put its policy in favor of abortion rights to a vote of the membership, showing a sensitivity, at least, to the anti-abortion movement, if not outright support of it.

Hecht said she has attended an evangelical church in Dallas, the Valley View Christian Church, for 25 years and “their position is pro-life and I’m sure her views are compatible with theirs.”

Miers bought a $150 ticket to a Texas anti-abortion group’s fund-raising dinner in 1989, the year she won a term on the Dallas city council, the group’s president said. Kyleen Wright of the Texans for Life Coalition, then called Texans United for Life, said the dinner drew about 30 other officeholders or candidates as “bronze patrons,” the lowest level of financial support.

“One would have to assume she is at least moderately pro-life, but how far that commitment goes, I really don’t know,” Wright said. “No one I know in the pro-life or pro-family movement knows her, locally or around the state.”

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