SCOTUS Nominee Miers: Poor Judgement In Question for Superfund Land Scandal?

She sounds more and more like the kind of evangelical Christian the right likes every day. Morally bankrupt (and a little stupid).

Miers family received 'excessive' sum in land case
RealCities.com
By JACK DOUGLAS JR. and STEPHEN HENDERSON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

The resulting six-figure payout to the Miers family in 2000 was despite the state’s objections to the "excessive” amount and to the process used to set the price. The panel recommended paying nearly $5 a square foot for land that was valued at less than 30 cents a square foot.

Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award from $106,915 to $80,915, but Miers, who controls the family’s interest in the land, hasn’t reimbursed the state for the $26,000 difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.

The case raises new questions about Miers’ judgment at a time when her nomination is troubled by doubts about her qualifications for the nation’s highest court and accusations that she was chosen mostly because of her close friendship with President Bush.

Nothing indicates that Miers sought out the judge or engineered the appointments to the panel, but there’s also no indication that she reported the potential conflicts of interest in the case or tried to avoid them.

Supreme Court justices, unlike other government officials, define potential conflicts of interest for themselves and are responsible for policing their own ethics.

“If Harriet Miers is confirmed, she’ll be entrusted to make a large number of un-reviewable decisions about which cases to sit on,” said Doug Kendall, the executive director of the Community Rights Counsel, a public-interest law firm in Washington. Kendall said the fact that Miers raised no red flags in the face of “clearly disturbing facts” in the land condemnation case doesn’t say much for her ethical acumen.

Ethical acumen!?! Now hold on there counsel fancy pants. No fair using big words the Judge don't know. Now. Next case. Mama wants to hang somebody.

Asked to start making sense in the Senate inquiry...

Miers quickly replied, writing that she would comply with the new request. She also wrote that "as a result of an administrative oversight," her Texas law license was suspended for 26 days in 1989 because of unpaid dues. On Monday, Miers disclosed that her D.C. law license was briefly suspended last year because of unpaid annual dues.

She had her lawyerin' license suspended twice for forgetting to pay the bill? Even while Counsel to PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

What they hell is she doing? Spending all her money on cats?

I tell you, when this woman goes for her confirmation hearings, she is going to be shred to pieces.

The so call clean record is starting to look like any other cronies record of the friends under the Bush administration.

If she decides to go for it and not withdraw, her hearings are going to be the best show on TV to watch.

Harriet Miers is a terrible pick and will not be confirmed for the Supreme Court.

President Bush is such a genius. So it wouldn't surprise me if this was all planned out to get a more conservative justice!

Originally posted by Carseller4
Harriet Miers is a terrible pick and will not be confirmed for the Supreme Court.

You are right on that one that is for sure, I give until the end of next week for her to step down.

President Bush is such a genius.

No, he is not genius, seller, he is losing his grip on the white house and the people around him.

Ms. Mier is just another of those friends that served him well during his government in Texas years with good services while she was working as a lawyer.

Miers' law firm profited from Bush campaign work

George W. Bush's rising political fortunes provided a windfall for Harriet Miers' law firm.

Campaign records show Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaigns paid Miers' firm $163,000 in legal fees, most of it for work done during Bush's 1998 re-election bid

www.cnn.com...

So it wouldn't surprise me if this was all planned out to get a more conservative justice!

Yeah, he is running out of choices occurs he had in mind Karl Rove you know. . . but we all know he is in deep dodo.

[edit on 23-10-2005 by marg6043]

Originally posted by Carseller4
President Bush is such a genius.

Now you're qualifed to be his next SCOTUS appointment.

It's not the character of your being or the color of your skin, just the color of the nose on the character.

Originally posted by Carseller4
Harriet Miers is a terrible pick and will not be confirmed for the Supreme Court.

She is such a BAD choice I'd like to think there is a method to the madness.
I have entertained the notion that Meirs is just there to aget shot down so the real person wanted for the bench will glide thorugh easier.

I feel for Judge O'Connor. She wanted out by the beginning of Nov. Her husband is ailing.
Then Bush decided to bump her replacement to get Roberts in.