Harriet Miers Biography

Harriet Miers serves as Counsel to the President. Most recently, she served as Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff, and prior to that she was Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary.

Ms. Miers has a long and distinguished professional career.

Before joining the President’s staff, she was Co-Managing Partner at Locke Liddell & Sapp, LLP from 1998-2000. She had worked at the Locke Purnell, Rain & Harrell firm, or its predecessor, from 1972 until its merger with the Liddell Sapp firm. From 1995 until 2000, she was chair of the Texas Lottery Commission. In 1992, Harriet became the first woman president of the Texas State Bar, and in 1985 she became the first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association. She also served as a Member-At-Large on the Dallas City Council.

Ms. Miers received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1967 and J.D. in 1970 from Southern Methodist University. Upon graduation, she clerked for U.S. District Judge Joe E. Estes from 1970 to 1972.

Ms. Miers had a distinguished career as a trial litigator, representing such clients as Microsoft, Walt Disney Co. and SunGard Data Systems Inc. Moreover, when she left her law firm of Locke, Liddell & Sapp, Ms. Miers was serving as Co-Managing Partner of the firm which had more than 400 lawyers.

Throughout her career, Ms. Miers has been committed to public service. In addition to her extensive involvement in the State Bar of Texas and the American Bar Association, Ms. Miers has been an elected official, a statewide officeholder, and a strong advocate of pro bono work.

During her time in the Administration, Ms. Miers has addressed numerous legal and policy questions at the highest levels of decision making, most recently serving as the Counsel to the President of the United States.

Ms. Miers has been a trailblazer for women professionals.

In 1972, Ms. Miers became the first woman hired at Dallas’s Locke Purnell Rain Harrell. In March 1996, her colleagues elected her the first female President of Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell, at that time a firm of about 200 lawyers. She was the first woman to lead a Texas firm of that size.

In 1985, Ms. Miers was selected as the first woman to become President of the Dallas Bar Association.

In 1992, she became the first woman elected President of the State Bar of Texas. Ms. Miers served as the President of the State Bar of Texas from 1992 to 1993.

Ms. Miers recent career has been marked by her participation at the highest levels of government.

She was appointed Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary on January 20, 2001. As Staff Secretary, Ms. Miers acted as “the ultimate gatekeeper for what crosses the desk of the nation’s commander in chief.” In addition to this important role, Ms. Miers supervised more than 60 employees in four departments.

In 2003, Ms. Miers was named Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff. As part of the Office of the Chief of Staff, she was a top domestic policy advisor to the President.

Ms. Miers has served as Counsel to the President since February 2005. In this role, she has served as the top lawyer to the President and the White House, and in particular has been the principal advisor judicial nominations.

Ms. Miers’s professional accomplishments have been recognized time and time again.

Ms. Miers made partner at her law firm in 1978; the next year, she was honored as the Outstanding Young Lawyer of Dallas by the Dallas Association of Young Lawyers.

On numerous occasions, the National Law Journal named her one of the Nation’s 100 most powerful attorneys, and as one of the Nation’s top 50 women lawyers.

She has received countless awards recognizing her distinguished career, including 1997 Woman of the Year, the 1996 Louise Raggio Award, the 1993 Sarah T. Hughes Award, and the 1992 Dallas Bar Association’s Justinian Award for Community Service. In 2005 she received the Sandra Day O’Connor award.

In 1996 alone, she was honored with the Anti-Defamation League’s Jurisprudence Award and the Legal Services of North Texas 1996 Merrill Hartman Award.

She also has been the recipient of a Women of Excellence Award, sponsored by Dallas’s Women’s Enterprise, for her work with the Dallas Bar Association and Dallas’s Girls Inc.

Ms. Miers has been an active participant in our nation’s political process.

In 1989, she was elected to a two-year term as an at-large candidate on the Dallas City Council. She chose not to run for re-election when her term expired.

Ms. Miers served as general counsel for the transition team of Governor-elect George W. Bush in 1994.

From 1995 until 2000, Ms. Miers served as Chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission, a voluntary public service position she undertook while maintaining her legal practice and other responsibilities. After then-Governor Bush appointed Ms. Miers to a six-year term on the Texas Lottery Commission, she served as a driving force behind its cleanup. In an editorial, The Dallas Morning News complimented her distinguished service and her success in ensuring the lottery’s integrity.

In addition to her trailblazing role in the Dallas Bar and Texas State Bar, Ms. Miers has been a strong voice in the American Bar Association, the leading professional organization for lawyers across the country, and the Texas State Bar.

She was one of two candidates for the number two position at the ABA, chair of the House of Delegates, before withdrawing her candidacy to move to Washington to serve in the Bush Administration.

Ms. Miers also served as the chair of the ABA’s Commission on Multi-jurisdictional Practice and was a member of the ABA Governance Committee.

She has also served as the Chair of the Board of Editors of the ABA Bar Journal.

Similarly, she has served as the chairwoman of the Legal Services to the Poor in Civil Matters Committee of the State Bar of Texas.

Throughout her career, Ms. Miers has successfully balanced her professional obligations and community involvement.

For example, while she served as President of the State Bar of Texas, Ms. Miers also logged 125 pro bono hours handling an immigration and naturalization case for Catholic Charities of Dallas.

In addition to her service to the Bar and her pro bono commitments, Ms. Miers has served on the Executive Board for the Southern Methodist University School of Law and as a Trustee of the Southwestern Legal Foundation.

Ms. Miers is single and very close to her family: two brothers and her mother live in Dallas, and a third brother lives in Houston.

from Slate’s blog review

Crony on the Court?
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 11:30 AM PT

Crony on the court?: This morning, President Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers, who has never been a judge, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. Bloggers’ reaction was quick and biting—and this time, much of the venom came from conservatives.

At the National Review, former Bush speechwriter David Frum sets the tone by calling the nomination “an unforced error” and a missed opportunity to significantly shift the court rightward. Leading conservative Ed Morrissey agrees. “Not only does Harriet Miers not look like the best candidate for the job, she doesn’t even look like the best female candidate for the job,” he writes at Captain’s Quarters.

Volokh Conspiracy legal eagle Orin Kerr is especially flummoxed. “As far as I can tell, she has no particular experience or expertise in any areas of law that the Supreme Court is likely to consider in the next twenty years; she has no history of having thought deeply about the role of judges in a constitutional democracy; and she is a complete unknown among the parts of the DC legal community that will now be considering her candidacy for the Supreme Court.” Many beltway observers are equally dismayed. “It’s possible that with a six-week bar review course, any of us would be more qualified than Harriet Miers to sit on the Supreme Court,” writes Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan, a guest at Political Animal. “Bush chose hackery.”

President Bush today announced he will choose his former personal lawyer, Harriet Mier, as his next Supreme Court nominee to replace the redoubtable and balancing Sandra Day O’Conner.

My friend Sharon Astrin nailed the pick. Her logic was, apparently, impeccable (Sharon is often impeccable in other ways). Sharon figured that Ms. Mier is an insider loyalist with few public statements about judicial matters, and like Dick Cheney who was selected as vice president after leading the search committee for a nominee, Ms. Mier was the lead White House appointee to seek out Supreme Court nominees. My own guess was Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general. I’m rather glad Sharon was right instead of me.

One of the reasons I’m glad is that it appears that this selection will probably “save” Roe v. Wade from being overturned. Sorry, pro-lifers, but not this time.

Ms. Mier is a former corporate lawyer known for being able to keep her darn mouth shut in her Dallas practice before going to the White House with President Bush. Discretion is a big deal in all events, but in this case it means that this nominee won’t have many uncomfortable questions to answer about things she’s said publicly before going before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. It will be very difficult for anyone to block this nominee as far as I can tell at this point.

In fact, it doesn’t appear that Ms. Mier is an ideologue about much of anything, at least according to the public records. Smart, savvy and hard working, yes. Hard right wing, no.

Sharon said something else about this nominee that I thought was brilliant: “this is Bush’s Ruth Bader Ginsberg”. Give Ms. Astrin credit where credit is due, she made the pick and polished it off with elan.

Sunday’s Washington Post coverage:

By Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 2, 2005; Page A05

As the CIA leak investigation heads toward its expected conclusion this month, it has become increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated.

With New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s release from jail Thursday and testimony Friday before a federal grand jury, the role of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, came into clearer focus. Libby, a central figure in the probe since its earliest days and the vice president’s main counselor, discussed Plame with at least two reporters but testified that he never mentioned her name or her covert status at the CIA, according to lawyers in the case.

His story is similar to that of Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser. Rove, who was not an initial focus of the investigation, testified that he, too, talked with two reporters about Plame but never supplied her name or CIA role.

Their testimony seems to contradict what the White House was saying a few months after Plame’s CIA job became public.

In October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that he personally asked Libby and Rove whether they were involved, “so I could come back to you and say they were not involved.” Asked if that was a categorical denial of their involvement, he said, “That is correct.”

Washington insiders speculate, according to the article, that the prosecutor is contemplating a sticky wicket for the Bush Administration: a charge of criminal conspiracy to “out” covert CIA employee Valerie Plame by a number of White House operatives, mostly centered in the office of the Vice President, the emotional and intellectual engine of the effort to drive the nation into war in Iraq and the originator of the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

For those of you that read the papers, you will know that the top two suspects are Karl Rove, the president’s chief of staff, and L. “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. The discussions between those two and reporters for the New York Times and Time Magazine (both of whom were jailed for refusing to disclose their sources) have been the focus of the grand jury for several months. The grand jury is over on October 28, and the prosecutor is expected to hand down indictments, if any, within the next few days.

Present and former intelligence officers decry the exposure of Ms. Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson’s refutation of a State of the Union assertion by President Bush that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger began the White House effort to discredit him via his connection by marriage to Ms. Plame. It is widely agreed by intelligence analysts that the failure of the Bush White House to punish the exposure of Ms. Plame would be a long-term problem for the nation. Bush, who originally said he would fire anyone involved, now has a “wait and see” attitude based on whether there are criminal charges that stick.

Clearly this administration is capable of anything, including treason, in service of their failed policies.

This article appeared in Sunday’s New York Times

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 – Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

If your stomach isn’t churning after reading this, no comment of mine is going to make a difference.

Told by his aides that 3 Brazilian soldiers had been killed in Iraq, the president broke down and cried. Finally, regaining his composure, he asked Secretary Rumsfeld: “Just exactly how many IS a brazillion?”

My mind is strange.

My first thought is that it’s 13 months before the ’06 election and will he have a preliminary hearing before then that will be showcased on television. A conspiracy charge isn’t very sexy image-wise, but there will always be the courthouse steps refusals to speak to the press under advice of attorney.

How well will that play in the Congressional races in OK and TX?

The latest political scuttlebutt around here is that Ernest Istook will be in the race for governor, although I can’t imagine a greater disaster.

That will leave the 5th District, essentially Oklahoma City, an open seat in Congress and therefore a hotly contested seat nationally between the national parties. I hear that’s the seat that Mary Fallin may seek.

What Democrat can take that seat from the GOP?

My own personal choice is Bernest Cain, but my personal conversations with him have been sincerely negative. He says he doesn’t have any interest and I hate that, but I have to believe him since he’s told me this on several occasions and has even refused my fundraising help. We went to law school together and we’re friendly, but I don’t claim to a “source close” to Sen. Cain.

Given the heavily GOP nature of the 5th District, I would think there would need to be a “tough” and/or “reform” Democrat to cross party lines on registration.

Oh, by the way, FUCK Tom DeLay. I think the death penalty’s barbaric, but…

10 years on each count. Hmmmm. This is serious shit for a Majority Leader from the U.S. Congress.

Since DeLay had to step down as Majority Leader, don’t you know there’s some dancing, wining, dining, arm twisting and shitting bricks going on in Wash. D.C. These are the times to enjoy being a common, ordinary voter and not a member of the political class.

I haven’t even touched the commentary yet, since I’m waiting to see the Sunday papers go all righteous and indignant, pulling out the big guns and coming up with a “watch this closely” summary. Assholes.

Our friend, SuzArt, danced out of VZDs tonight singing “Tom DeLay’s Indicted! Tom DeLay’s In-Dieee-ted!” Oh, how the closed captioning spun by!

Conspiracy has always been a curious criminal charge to me. Talking as a crime. Free speech and association problems anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

After the success of Napoleon Dynamite, I think the 5th District Democrats ought to find a good liberal Hispanic named Pedro …

I was hoping to get this in before midnight…