Wonkette is probably right today to wonder what it says about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers that “her strongest proponent (next to the president) is her ex?”
And what a proponent Nathan Hecht has been.
From conference calls with right-wing clergy and activists to interviews with every major newspaper, “Hardball” and NPR, Hecht has become a ubiquitous one-man band in support of his former gal pal. And he is sending out all the signals to religious conservatives that the administration wants him to, being blunt where they have to be subtle. He told the Los Angeles Times that “Harriet goes to a church that is pro-life. … She gives them a lot of money. Her personal views lie in that direction.” The Washington Post got this from him: “She thinks that after conception, it’s not a balancing act — or if it is, it’s a balancing of two equal lives.”
Journalists have started rightly wondering who Hecht really is, what makes him the person who should be interpreting Miers’ views, and what kind of relationship the two actually have.
The best answer was provided by a Los Angeles Times article this weekend that must have made editors giggle. It breathlessly starts: “He was a country boy who grew up on a wheat farm, she a city girl who played on her high school tennis team.”
It points to the unconventional nature of their relationship and calls it “European” — a designation that can’t be helpful in converting reluctant conservatives to her cause. (It could have been worse; the Times could have called the liaison “French”!) Hecht doesn’t provide much more detail on their relationship: “We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that’s the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently.”
But the gossipy piece is full of bizarrely precise details — like the fact that when Miers broke off relations with a man to whom she was engaged, it happened at a Denny’s, late at night, “over a plate of eggs over easy and ham.”
In the end we aren’t left with much more than the assessment, by Miers’ girlfriends, that the relationship was more tragic — “Shakespearean,” they call it — than romantic.
Slate takes a stab at trying to reveal something about Hecht by looking at his recent rulings on the Texas Supreme Court. Specifically, Emily Bazelon examines a 2000 case dealing with the issue of teenage abortions. Texas law demands that doctors first notify a girl’s parents before performing an abortion. Only under special circumstances can this law be bypassed. And it was these circumstances that were being debated in a series of cases that year.
Hecht, a member of the same evangelical, pro-life church Miers belongs to — in fact, he brought her into the church — set the bar very high for getting a bypass, and dissented from the court’s ruling that all a girl needed to do was understand and be aware of the health and moral risks of what she was doing. According to Slate, Hecht’s dissent argued that a bypass only be granted after a girl talked to “counselors (particularly religious ones) who oppose abortion and testify at length about ‘the family, social, psychological, emotional, moral, and religious implications of the abortion decision.'” Bazelon says that although this would have stopped a lot more abortions, it’s also would “impose a burden on women that’s not permissible, at least under current U.S. Supreme Court law.”
Should this tell us something about how Miers will rule?
It’s impossible to tell. But the very fact that the media have felt it necessary to dig into Miers’ boyfriend’s judicial past in order to try and illuminate her own judicial future illustrates not only how little is known about Miers herself, but also the reason the White House has a hard sell on its hands convincing even Republicans to get on board.
–Gal Beckerman
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.