While everyone else is reading tea leaves about Harriet Miers, a woman named Lorlee Bartos says she doesn't have to. Bartos ran Miers' first and only political campaign back in 1989, and she tells the Dallas Morning News that she knows firsthand about Miers' political views.
"She is on the extreme end of the anti-choice movement," Bartos says of her former client. "I think Harriet's belief was pretty strongly felt. I suspect she is of the same cloth as the president."
That's probably a fair thing to suspect. While the White House insists that George W. Bush doesn't impose an abortion "litmus test" on any of his judicial nominees, it's awfully hard to believe that the president would simply roll the dice on the issue that sits at the top of the list for many of his supporters. At the very least, you'd think that Bush would collect some clues before selecting a nominee, and there are certainly clues to collect about Miers. She gave $150 to an antiabortion group in 1989. And as the leader of the Texas State Bar in 1993, she tried to persuade the American Bar Association to take a neutral, rather than pro-choice, position on abortion rights.
Bartos tells the Morning News that Miers supported abortion rights as a young woman but then had a "a born-again, profound experience" that caused her to change her mind. Perhaps that's what the president had in mind yesterday when he said that he knows Miers and knows her "heart."
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