As we noted a couple of weeks ago, George W. Bush did a little dance when he was asked, during a Rose Garden press conference, what he knew about Harriet Miers’ views on abortion. The president kept saying that he didn’t have a “litmus test.” And when somebody asked him whether he’d ever asked Miers about her views on abortion, he suggested that he didn’t remember. “Not to my recollection have I ever sat down with her,” he said. “What I have done is understand the type of person she is and the type of judge she will be.”
We were skeptical then — did Bush really nominate someone whose views on abortion he didn’t know? — and it turns out that our skepticism was warranted. As we reported yesterday, a questionnaire Miers completed in 1989 makes it clear that she has held some extreme anti-abortion views. And as the Washington Post reports today, Bush was told about that questionnaire before he offered her a Supreme Court nomination. The president “was informed of the views she had expressed as a candidate for public office back in the late ’80s,” Scott McClellan says.
