Squeezing Harriet Miers Till She Talks

Charles Krauthammer’s comments in today’s Washington Post give some insight into the real reason why conservatives are now gathering in force against the Harriet Miers nomination. The nomination must be withdrawn, Krauthammer argues, not because Miers is unqualified, though he admits that she is, but because of what she knows about the Bush administration and about the President personally – information which she could conceivably be compelled to testify about under oath during the confirmation hearings. This would hand Democrats a golden opportunity to ask questions that President Bush in his ten years in politics has never answered. Imagine the possibilities. For starters, why did Bush’s 1998 re-election campaign for governor pay Miers' law firmthe unheard of sum of $140,000 for routine legal work, in addition to the $23,000 paid by Bush to Miers in 1994? At the time of the 1998 payment Bush was leading his opponent by 35 percentage points in the polls. What projects was Miers working on for Bush? Just to speculate, could it have had something to do with recurrent issues from Bush’s past – his avoidance of the draft during Vietnam, or his history as an addict? What does she know about Bush’s relationship with Ken Lay and the other Enron insiders who secretly helped Vice-President Cheney rewrite the nation’s energy laws? Does Miers know anything about the phony case for war in Iraq and the subsequent cover-up still under investigation? What about 9/11? Could Miers clear up any lingering doubts about the President’s response to warnings of an imminent terror attack in the summer of 2001? The list could go on and on. As Bush’s most trusted lawyer, Miers is a potential gold-mine for anyone interesting in unraveling the vast, intricately-linked criminal conspiracy which in essence is the Bush administration. (With an hour’s testimony, Miers could accomplish what it will take historians a generation to achieve.) As Krauthammer indicates in his column, that possibility has just occurred to him as well, and the image of a stage-struck Miers fumbling around under oath while trying to protect the President’s decades of secrets doesn’t sit well with him. Already, Krauthammer says, there’s the expected petty lies and malfeasance around the nomination process itself:

John Fund reports that in a conference call of conservative leaders, two Miers confidants explicitly said that she would overturn Roe v. Wade . The subsequent denial by one of these judges that he ever said that, and the subsequent affirmation by two of the people who had heard the call that he did say so, create the nightmare scenario of subpoenaed witnesses contradicting each other under oath. We need an exit strategy from this debacle. I have it…

Just imagine what Democrats could do with this kind of power, Krauthammer seems to be saying. He’s had enough of Harriet Miers. He’s telling the President to pull the plug on this one.