President's pick has leaned left and right

WASHINGTON -- In 1992, Harriet Miers was upset when the American Bar Association declared that the national lawyers organization endorsed abortion rights.

Miers, who had just been elected the first female president of the Texas state bar, led a movement calling on the ABA to put the abortion issue to a referendum of all its members rather than let its small policy-making board speak for everyone.

''If we were going to take a position on this divisive issue, the members should have been able to vote," Miers told the Washington Times in August 1993, after the ABA rejected her proposal.

All but forgotten and 12 years in the past, the ABA abortion flap took on instant importance yesterday when President Bush nominated Miers, who is now White House Counsel, to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, an abortion rights supporter.

Miers's unsuccessful bid to let the ABA's membership decide whether or not the group should endorse abortion rights suggests that she may be a critic of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision. Reporters, Senate Judiciary Committee staffers, and activists across the political spectrum are now poring over Miers's record in search of such signs of her legal philosophy.

For the most part, they found only hints, extrapolations, and guesses. On the first day of her nomination, Miers, 60, presented the nation with a mystery. While she has had a long career as a respected corporate attorney, Miers has left almost no public record detailing her judicial views.

She has never been a judge, nor clerked for one above the trial court level. She has never written an academic law journal article. She has spoken out in favor of the Bush administration's education legislation and antiterrorism policies, but has virtually no record on broader issues of the environment, gay rights, separation of church and state, or civil rights.

Many politicians yesterday reserved judgment on Miers, saying they wanted to hear her Senate testimony first. But Miers has already indicated a reluctance to discuss specific issues. In February 1992, the Associated Press quoted Miers as saying that no president should ask a potential Supreme Court nominee how he or she would rule on abortion.

''Nominees are clearly prohibited from making such a commitment and presidents are prohibited from asking for it," Miers said at an ABA convention.

Still, there were some tantalizing and contradictory traces of a record, showing Miers associated with positions that are on both sides of the court's ideological divide.

In 1998, while heading the ABA's rules and calendar committee, she submitted policy views for discussion by the group's membership, including two that are hardly conservative: endorsing an International Criminal Court, and lifting bans on adoptions by homosexuals.

But Gail Alexander-Wise, director of ABA media relations, emphasized that Miers was only carrying out an administrative duty and did not necessarily endorse those positions just because she submitted them for discussion.

Still, early records searches found evidence that Miers has not always been a conservative purist.

Although she has donated exclusively to Republican campaigns since 1989, she previously donated to several Democratic campaigns, including $1,000 to Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1987; and $1,000 each to the Democratic National Committee and to Tennessee Senator Al Gore's first bid for the presidency in 1988.

Moreover, as a Dallas city councilor, she cast a deciding vote to raise local property taxes by 7 percent to restore $900,000 in proposed budget cuts to the library system, arts programs, and other services, according to a September 1990 Dallas Times Herald article.

As incoming president of the Texas Bar Association, she pledged in a 1992 Texas Bar Journal interview to be ''inclusive of women and minorities" in making committee appointments, a position that could indicate support for affirmative action. She also called for more volunteer legal aid work, using language that sounds like Democratic rhetoric.

''Our Pledge of Allegiance promises equal justice for all. We know that we have failed in fulfilling this promise to segments of our society. For example, children, the elderly, the poor, non-English-speaking peoples, the disabled, and other groups traditionally have been underrepresented," she said.

As some conservatives yesterday expressed disappointment with Miers, the White House and its allies scrambled to reassure their supporters that Miers would not be another Justice David Souter -- who was similarly unknown when Bush's father nominated him, and turned out to be far more liberal than his backers expected.

In a memo to supporters, Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society, called Miers ''a fearless and very strong proponent of conservative legal views" who ''led a campaign to have the American Bar Association end its practice of supporting abortion-on-demand and taxpayer-funded abortions."

Republican strategists also pointed out that in 1989 Miers made a $150 contribution to an antiabortion group in Texas.

Reached by phone, Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, a longtime close friend of Miers, said she has been an active member of the evangelical Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, where he has been an elder, for 25 years. Miers, he said, donates at least 10 percent of her income to the church, which he said disapproves of ''gay lifestyle" and abortion.

Her views on abortion, Hecht said, ''are consistent with the church's."

But, Hecht added, whether that means Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade is another matter: ''You take an oath and can't just do whatever you want to do."

Meanwhile, Joe W. ''Chip" Pitts III, the immediate past chairman of the liberal Amnesty International USA, said he was ''greatly relieved" by Bush's choice. Pitts, a longtime member of the Dallas legal community, said the Miers he knows is a mainstream conservative and a fact-driven pragmatist who is concerned about the poor.

''I think if she were confirmed it would be good for the country," Pitts said.