I am sympathetic to the conservatives who have reservations
about the choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, but where
were these people six years ago when President Bush’s Republican
nomination was sealed?
The Miers pick has spurred many conservatives to finally bemoan
the president’s woeful track record on the issues they care about.
Their legal hero (appropriately) Robert Bork, writing for the
Wall Street Journal Wednesday, said Bush backers should
rethink their support for him because he “has not governed as a
conservative.” Citing the president’s policies on amnesty for
illegal immigrants, reckless federal spending, and signing
unconstitutional campaign finance reform into law, Bork said, “This
George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent,
if not actively hostile, to conservative values.”
Bork’s gripes have been echoed in many other corners, but this
is a surprise? Back in 1999 Republicans filled Bush’s campaign
coffers with more than $193 million — $96.3 of it for the
primaries — scaring off all serious opponents except for Arizona
Sen. John McCain, briefly. Unlike what they are doing now with
Miers, conservatives declined to administer a background exam for
the former Texas governor to discern how he would likely lead the
nation.
This was despite clear warning signs out of Texas about Bush’s
conservative credentials. Tom Pauken, who chaired the state’s
Republican Party in 1994 and whose bona fides are well established,
warned in May 1999 that Bush was a “me-too Republican.”
“His handlers are going to position him in the campaign as a
conservative answer,” Pauken told an alternative publication, the
Austin Chronicle. “So many Republicans who are so
desperate to win the White House will say he is our only hope, that
we need to vote for him. But grassroots conservatives, movement
conservatives, know he’s not one of us.”
During Bush’s campaign for re-election as governor in 1998, he
was endorsed by the most powerful Democrat in the state, Lt. Gov.
Bob Bullock. A few other prominent Democrats supported him against
their own candidate, Garry Mauro, because as PBS reported at the
time, “he has made it a policy to work in a bipartisan way to get
his agenda passed.” The Washington Post noted in a May
1997 article that Bush was “more likely to draw opposition from his
party’s right wing than from the Democrats,” and that he worked
well with Texas House Speaker Pete Laney and the “legendarily terse
and strong-willed” Bullock.
“[Bush has] staked out a middle position a lot like Clinton,”
said Rice University political science professor Bob Stein on the
“PBS Newshour” in 1998. “He’s taken an enormous amount of heat from
the conservative right of his party….”
Despite his ideological shortcomings, conservatives didn’t
hesitate to help crown Bush as the GOP nominee. The Republican
Governors’ Association jumped on board early, and by the start of
2000, 25 of the 31 individual GOP state governors had endorsed him.
In February the same year 40 Republican senators announced their
support of Bush over McCain. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of
Mississippi and his colleagues ignored the warnings out of the Lone
Star State that its governor was a compromising go-along. In fact,
many of them embraced Bush’s modus operandi.
“Senate Republicans are very impressed with George W. Bush, his
qualifications and the job he’s done,” Lott told CNN at the time.
“As Governor of Texas, he’s done some outstanding things in terms
of education reform…he worked with the legislature — Republicans
and Democrats got it done.”
Now many — Lott and several other conservative senators like
Virginia’s George Allen and Kansas’s Sam Brownback — find
themselves in the position as Miers skeptics, and wondering how
they got there.
“There are a lot more people — men, women, and minorities —
that are more qualified in my opinion by their experience than she
is,” Lott said recently in a television interview. “I don’t just
automatically salute or take a deep bow anytime a nominee is sent
[to the Senate]…I have to find out who these people are, and
right now, I’m not satisfied with what I know.”
Not all conservatives joined Bush’s bandwagon during the
primaries in 2000, but most did — resignedly — by the general
election. His head start in fundraising and campaigning was too
large to surpass, much less catch.
Perhaps this episode will teach conservatives that next time the
vetting process for Supreme Court nominees needs to start
extremely early — with serious scrutiny of the
presidential candidate who will be appointing them.
Paul Chesser is an associate editor for the John Locke
Foundation.
