Some high court candidates withdrew: White House

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couple” of candidates who had withdrawn from consideration.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.