Harriett Miers Is Pro Life

Some high court candidates withdrew: White House

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Wed Oct 12, 2005 12:14 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some Supreme Court candidates withdrew from consideration but that had nothing to do with President George W. Bush's eventual selection of White House lawyer Harriet Miers, the White House said on Wednesday.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan confirmed what conservative Christian leader James Dobson told his radio program about an October 1 telephone conversation he had had with top White House aide Karl Rove, in which Rove tried to convince Dobson to support Miers for the Supreme Court.

A senior administration official said it was "just a couple" of candidates who had withdrawn from consideration.

Many conservatives, who have been among Bush's strongest supporters, are outraged that the president picked a White House insider who lacks judicial experience instead of a judge with clear-cut conservative credentials who could be counted on to move the high court firmly to the right.

Bush and his team are scrambling to save the nomination amid calls from some conservatives that he withdraw Miers from consideration.

McClellan said Rove told Dobson that "some individuals, when the list was longer, well into the double digits, had said that they preferred not to be considered" because they did not want to deal with "the ordeal of going through the confirmation process."

REPLACING SWING VOTE
But he said that had nothing to do with Bush's eventual nomination of Miers to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative who had often been a swing vote on the closely divided court.

"The president made a decision to nominate Harriet Miers. That was his choice, his only choice," McClellan said.

McClellan would give no names of candidates who withdrew but federal appeals court judge Priscilla Owen of Texas was reportedly one of them.

Democrats had blocked Bush's nomination of Owen to the appellate court during his first term, and they had warned she would have trouble getting confirmed by the U.S. Senate if he nominated her to the Supreme Court.

Bush says Miers shares his conservative judicial philosophy but so far there has been little paperwork to document her views on abortion and other divisive legal issues.

But Dobson said Rove told him Miers is "an evangelical Christian; that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life; that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion; that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life."

Dobson, one of few conservative Christian leaders to endorse Miers, is founder of Focus on the Family, an evangelical group.

Most of the paperwork to emerge about Miers so far has been in the form of gushing letters she wrote to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

"You are the best governor ever -- deserving of great respect," said one such note, a 1997 birthday card.

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