Newsweek: Conservative "brain trust" rebels on Miers

Newsweek reports that the conservative strategists who helped President Bush plan and execute the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court are not inclined to make a similar effort on behalf of Harriet Miers.

Michael Isikoff gained access to private e-mails exchanged between people to whom the White House reached out. They reveal a lack of enthusiasm bordering on contempt for both Miers and her patron Bush.

"We are keeping quiet. And hiding from the media," wrote Abigail Thernstrom, the Bush-designated vice chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a prominent critic of affirmative-action policies, in an e-mail copied to other members of the network. "As for undermining trust in the president, I am afraid he has accomplished that all on his own—without any help from us." (Asked for comment last week, Thernstrom said she was upset that a "private e-mail exchange ends up in the news media.")

The e-mails, copies of which were obtained by NEWSWEEK from one of the participants, illustrate the depth of conservative angst over the Miers selection. Many on the e-mail trail fretted about their own "credibility" if they publicly took up the cause for Miers, who seemed to lack the credentials they value. "It no longer matters whether she's the second coming of John Marshall; the cronyism charge has stuck, bec. [sic] it's so obviously true," wrote Michael Greve, a legal scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Greve wondered what was next. Would Bush, he asked, replace Fed chair Alan Greenspan with "a young lady in the basement of the West Wing who did a terrific job on the TX Railroad Commission [and was the] first Armenian bond trader in Dallas ..."

This is stunning. The conservative crackup is real. Serious conservative thinkers are disgusted by what they see as an incomprehensible act of cronyism. Evangelicals who care about nothing - nothing - but outlawing abortion have the sinking feeling that Miers is not the anti-choice holy warrior they have been praying for. GOP political strategists are sweating blood as the electoral coalition that has swept dozens of Republicans into office over the past decade loses cohesion.

How did this happen? Did President Bush not understand the magnitude of this moment in history? Did he not realize that this nomination - this precise opening on the Supreme Court - was the sole thing keeping Republicans in his corner through the spending orgies; the unnecessary war; the torture scandal; the abandonment of competent, responsible government? How on earth could he not have understood this?

Or, perhaps he did. Perhaps Bush genuinely does not care one whit about abortion. Maybe the long-standing suspicions of the religious right are correct, that Bush has no real convictions on the issues most dear to them: abortion and homosexuality. It would explain the fact that after four-and-a-half years in office he has done nothing to address either one.

We are witnessing the end of the current cycle of GOP dominance in American politics. If Harriet Miers and John Roberts fail to effect the end of Roe v. Wade, the secular wing of the Republican Party will never get the Evangelicals back. The religious right will never support another candidate who does not declare him- or herself, in the starkest terms possible, a mortal foe of abortion. Of course, no candidate with such extreme views will have a chance of appealing to more moderate, mainstream voters. The Christian right will have the culture war it has longed for, but it will not be with the secular left. It will be with the broad middle of its own movement. It will be GOP civil war.

George W. Bush, the self-styled uniter, has managed to mortally wound the conservative movement at what should have been the moment of its supreme ascendancy.