Supreme Court

She's Broke!

Filed under: Supreme Court

Finally, just as she goes down in flames, a reason to like Harriet Miers.

Today's Slate contains several interesting articles about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, but my hands-down favorite is one by a former securities analyst that points out that at 60, Bush's longtime crony has nowhere near enough money for a secure retirement. Yep, that's right, consigliore to George W. Bush, the man who decreed that his (now squandered?) political capital would be spent privatizing Social Security.

When Miers left Dallas law firm Locke Liddell in 1999--and the $624,000 salary she earned as a managing partner--her IRA (then a firm profit-sharing account) contained between $500,000 and $1 million. Every year since, however, this account balance has mysteriously declined, so much so that it now totals the aforementioned $207,000...

...So, where has all that retirement money been going? Perhaps to another expense category depressingly familiar to most Americans: health-care costs. According to the Journal and AP, Miers is the primary caretaker for her 91-year-old mother, who has required in-home and nursing-home care since the mid-1990s. That a decade of her mom's health care could consume several hundred thousand dollars set aside for Miers' own retirement won't come as a surprise to anyone who has had (or paid for) a long-term illness in recent years.

I possess a uterus, and damn strong feelings about retaining control of it, but I daresay the spectre of abortion becoming illegal in this country is softened considerably by the thought of a justice who has some recent experience with what it's like to find that being middle class has diddly to do with financial security.

Posted by Beth Hawkins at October 21, 2005 9:34 AM | Comments (0)

 

Supremes: White House evacuating for Hurricane Patrick?

Filed under: Supreme Court

The emerging conventional wisdom about the Harriet Miers nomination--ratified today by the Big Three dailies (NYT, WP, LAT)--is that it's a safe compromise pick by a weakened Bush administration. Richard Stevenson of the NYT writes that in picking Miers, "President Bush revealed something about himself: that he has no appetite, at a time when he and his party are besieged by problems, for an all-out ideological fight." Dan Balz joins him in the echo chamber: "The nomination appeared designed primarily to avoid a major fight in the Senate and, said skeptics on the left and right, was made out of a position of political weakness, not strength."

What's so safe about Harriet Miers? You can be sure the Bush gang recognized her appointment would draw cries of cronyism, coming so soon on the heels of Katrina and the Mike Brown saga. It's likewise plain that they saw the conservative reaction coming: Dick Cheney got on the line with Rush Limbaugh just a few hours later as part of the Miers media rollout.

Meanwhile no one, the major pro-Dem bloggers included, is paying attention to what may prove to be the biggest elephant in the room: the looming conclusion of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's year-and-a-half-long investigation of the Plame/CIA leak. On Sunday, the WashPost's CIA love slave, Walter Pincus--who has been a steady and reliable source of stories damaging to Bush--reiterated that Fitzgerald is trying to establish a conspiracy involving Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the president's and vice-president's right hand men. On ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this teaser: "A source close to this [investigation] told me this week that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions."

Play this out. Discount what Stephanopoulos said if you like. We are still left with a multiplicity of grand jury leaks since this summer indicating that Fitzgerald is angling for criminal conspiracy charges against two of the most senior officials in the Bush White House. If this happens, it's sure to elicit legal challenges on grounds of executive privilege and--this being the Bush crew--national security. Against this backdrop, the president appoints to the Supreme Court his White House counsel and former personal lawyer, a woman repeatedly described in the past 24 hours as a "Bush loyalist" and "a pit bull in size 6 shoes." See anything remotely suspicious?

Posted by Steve Perry at October 4, 2005 8:25 AM | Comments (3)