Dems Step Up Miers Rhetoric

Speaking of Harriet Miers, Howard Dean told George Stephonopoulos this morning on ABC's This Week:

"We have no idea what this woman's record is about. She's obviously an accomplished attorney. The question is what does she believe. We have no idea. We've got to see what she wrote for the president when she was his legal counsel."

Of course, he's never going to get attorney-client privileged information from that time because everyone knows that if the GOP were demanding similar papers from a Dem Prez, Dean would be lead howler.

But he's setting up the argument, and Sen. Leahy is joining in:

"The president has based that decision based on what he's seen her do in the White House. We ought to at least know what she did in the White House."

So the confirmation battle is setting up on two fronts: One is over the release of documents and it puts the White House in a tough place. It can't set a damaging precedent that would weaken privilege, but it needs to find something releaseable that shows a solid, steady, well-thought legal mind at work.

If it doesn't, it runs the risk of proving Sen. Schumer true on the second front of the confirmation campaign. He's predicting:

"If you held the vote today, she would not get a majority either in the Judiciary Committee or the floor. [On the 18-member committee], there are one or two who said they'd support her as of now."

The vote is not today, it's after the hearings. And today, the Senators and the conservative bloggers sound like they are prognosticators on a par with Ray Nagin, who in the days immediately after Katrina consistently over-predicted the amount of death, crime and destruction.

They're over-predicting how badly the hearings will go for Miers. We'll see. She didn't get to where she is by being incapable. (source)