I’ve disagreed with a great deal of what Hugh Hewitt has written about the Miers nomination, but he had one post recently that I think is quite plausible. If confirmed, Hewitt predicted, Harriett Miers would probably be something like centrist Justice Potter Stewart:
How will Harriet Miers turn out on the SCOTUS? My best guess is a lot like Potter Stewart, in temperment and tone, and in results.
Given how little we know about Harriett Miers, it’s hard to know for sure. Maybe she will turn out to be very conservative. Still, I think Miers-as-Stewart is a pretty fair guess. It’s hard to describe Stewart’s long career in a sentence, but I think it’s fair to say that Potter Stewart was often considered a centrist or moderate conservative swing vote on a relatively liberal court. His was a somewhat unpredictable vote, joining Brennan and Marshall on the left in some cases and Rehnquist on the right in others.
I think it’s plausible that Miers would take a similar approach, at least based on the little we know. It seems likely to me that Miers has relatively few strong political or jurisprudential commitments: if she did, those views presumably would have come out at some point in her long career. The few glimpses we have into her own ideas seem to suggest that she is what I think of as a Texas Democrat — moderate to conservative on social issues, relatively liberal on economic issues. Those hints are just hints, of course. Miers seems to be more of a process person than a concept person, so we don’t have a lot to go on. In the midst of that uncertainty, though, the idea that Miers might end up as a centrist in the Potter Stewart style seems to me a plausible guess.
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