Senate Judiciary Committee Asks Miers for More Details

WASHINGTON _ Calling her responses “inadequate” and “insufficient,” the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the highly unusual step Wednesday of asking Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers to redo significant portions of the questionnaire she had submitted to the committee just a day earlier.

Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s senior Democrat, sent Miers a letter seeking more detailed responses to a third of their original questions, covering almost every aspect of her legal work and continuing through the selection process that led to her nomination. And they sought more information from her about her work as White House counsel.

Specter also announced that the committee would begin hearings on Miers’ nomination on Nov. 7, giving her less than three weeks to respond to questions, continue her meetings with senators, read constitutional law cases and undergo practice sessions. He refused to guarantee a vote by Thanksgiving, the date hoped for by the White House.

The sharp criticism of Miers’ responses came as the White House sought to bolster support for her beleaguered nomination by stressing her qualifications and legal career. In a joint press conference, Specter and Leahy made clear Miers had not yet cleared that hurdle.

“On the balance of her answers, they’re incomplete,” said Specter, noting she had only provided a “skimpy little group” of cases she had handled.

Wednesday’s letter to Miers went far beyond the routine follow-up questions often put to nominees by individual senators. It asked for a wholesale re-examination of the questionnaire, noting that committee staffers already had identified additional cases she had neglected to include.

Leahy said reactions to the questionnaire by senators on the Judiciary Committee ranged from “insulting” to “incomplete.”

“Certainly it was inadequate and did not give us enough to prepare for a hearing,” Leahy said.

Specter said he agreed.

Within hours, Miers responded with a letter to Specter and Leahy saying she would “work to provide additional materials.” She also noted that she was suspended from practicing law in Texas for a month in 1989 because she had been late paying her bar dues. Miers also was suspended from the Washington, D.C., bar for nonpayment of dues last year. In both cases, she paid the dues and was reinstated.

In the 57-page questionnaire she submitted Tuesday, Miers gave committee members background information on her legal and political career and outside activities. She listed her cases and speeches and articles and provided three separate boxes of additional information.

But as committee staffers started poring through the material, they immediately noticed what it did not contain, according to several staffers who asked not to be identified by name. In numerous instances, for example, she declined to provide dates _ whether of speeches, legal cases or newspaper articles. She also didn’t disclose what percentage of her legal work was in state and federal court _ a standard question for judicial nominees.

She didn’t discuss her work on constitutional issues in detail. She just said “no” when asked to provide copies of all communications between administration officials and outside groups seeking assurances on her conservative bona fides.

Staffers also were struck by the cases she listed because the questionnaire had asked her to include all litigation in which she had participated. Senior Republican aides on the Judiciary Committee did a quick search on the Internet and found a page and a half of additional cases.

“In a good hour’s work, they found a couple pages of stuff that had not been listed _ and it wasn’t like an in-depth investigative search. It was just your normal, `Hey, let’s see what we can find,’” said one senior Republican committee aide.

In the news conference, Specter and Leahy also took issue with the White House’s efforts to sell Miers’ nomination to social conservatives through a series of conference calls and back-room discussions about her religious views.

Specter called the process “chaotic.” He also indicated he did not believe he had mischaracterized Miers’ views on privacy when he spoke to reporters after a closed-door meeting with the nominee on Monday. He said then that Miers had said she believes there is a right to privacy in the Constitution.

She insisted he misinterpreted her views about two Supreme Court cases interpreting a right to privacy, an important issue because the right to privacy is the underlying principle in the court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to abortion.

Miers, who in 1989 told a Texas anti-abortion group that she would support a constitutional amendment banning abortions except when necessary to save a mother’s life, asked Specter to clarify his statement and he agreed. He said earlier this week that he “accepts Ms. Miers’ statement that he misunderstood what she said.”

But Specter, a former prosecutor, said Wednesday that in his years of meeting with Supreme Court nominees, he’d “never walked out of a room and had a disagreement as to what was said.”

“The sooner we get into a hearing room where there’s a stenographer and public record, the better off the process is,” Specter said.

___

(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

_____

PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): MIERS

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.