Harriet Miers: Make of it What You Will

Sometime this evening washingtonpost.com put up a story by John Pomfret slated for A6 in the Friday edition, As A Lawyer, Miers Focused on Policy. It's a look at her lawyering, saying she was more interested in the "merits" of a case than procedure. I'm sure much will be made of the following, despite the immediate disclaimer provided by a colleague--or maybe because of it:

[Law professor Sanford] Levinson was one of several lawyers who faced off against Miers in a suit in 2000 after the disputed presidential election.

Three Texas voters sued Bush, alleging that both he and Richard B. Cheney were from Texas and therefore Texas's electoral college delegates could not vote for both of them. The case hinged on an obscure section of the 12th Amendment, which has never been invoked.

Levinson, who described the case as a "law professor's dream," said that part of what made the case fun for him was that he could argue the case like a Republican, meaning that he and his colleagues based the case on a narrow reading of the Constitution going back to the Framers' original intent. Miers took the opposite tack, sounding more like a liberal, arguing in her brief to the court for a "broad and inclusive" interpretation of the Constitution based on the belief that the clause makes no sense in today's world. She simultaneously focused on technicalities -- Cheney had forwarded his mail to Wyoming from his Dallas home and canceled his Texas driver's license.

Levinson said that to extrapolate from this case that Miers was a closet liberal would be a mistake. "This is a person who has almost no experience doing constitutional law, and the one case she is involved with is on a subject almost no one has talked about, at a time of extraordinary partisan interest," he said. "The only thing to infer from this is that she's a good lawyer." A federal judge dismissed the case on Dec. 1, 2000, the day it was filed....