At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, “the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”
But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.
“That’s a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause,” said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. “If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.”
Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, also an expert on voting rights, said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers’ questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.
“Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking,” she said.
2 thoughts on “Are they trying to set her up?”
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Maybe she’s a decoy while they set up someone else they really wanted all along. That person will seem so much more able after Miers that both parties will jump on the bandwagon out of relief and we’ll get stuck with some totalitarian for the next 30 years. I realize that sounds awfully cynical, but this administration hasn’t done a whole lot to earn my trust.
This Bush Administration has done nothing to earn my trust. In fact, just about everything this group has done has had the opposite effect.