Harriet Miers' Liberal Leanings

President Bush insists that Harriet Miers will be the same person 20 years from now that she is today. One wonders if she is the same person today that she was 15 or so years ago.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Miers' writings for the Texas Bar Journal are not at all what one would expect from a conservative in the mold of Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia. They examined material she published in 1992 and 1993 when she was president of the State Bar of Texas.

At the time, she was perched atop a fractious organization of 55,000 lawyers that included law-and-order prosecutors, boardroom advisors and legal clinicians paid in chickens on the border. The crosscurrents were fierce, and Miers fought them by choosing a path that could safely be described as politically moderate and, at times, liberal — by Texas standards anyway.

She called for increased funding for legal services for the poor and suggested that taxes might have to be raised to achieve the notion of "justice for all."

She praised the benefits of diversity, called for measures that would send more minority students to law schools, and said that just because a woman was the head of the state bar did not mean that "all unfair barriers for women have been eradicated."

She was upset that although poverty was rising in Texas, impoverished families received a disproportionately small share of welfare and Medicaid benefits.

And she was an unapologetic defender of her profession, even the oft-maligned "trial lawyer.

Now, conservatives are expected to accept Bush's assurance that Miers is the kind of legal practitioner that he had in mind when he promised to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. Is it any wonder they are not buying it?

Harriet Miers is turning out to be the ultimate stealth candidate. It is impossible even to hazard a guess as to what kind of Supreme Court justice she would be.