QUAGMIERS.(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet E. Miers)

It's early yet, but plumbing the depths of Associate Justice-to-be (or not to be) Harriet E. Miers, if there are any, promises to have more in common with archeology than with law. Figuring out who she is, and what she would be likely to bring to the Supreme Court, will be like deducing the life story of some mid-level functionary of an ancient Pharaoh's court from a few shards of pottery found in the rubble of a looted tomb.

The papyrus trail, in other words, is sparse. That was said to be true also of John Roberts, now Chief Justice of the United States. But Roberts, by comparison, was as thoroughly footnoted as a stack of doctoral theses. The vanloads of Roberts-related material that the National Archives delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee added up to more than eighty thousand pages. For Harriet Miers, vans will not be required. There's nothing in the Archives, because she is not known to have ever done a day's work in any branch of the national government before she joined George W. Bush's White House staff, in 2001. If there is anything interesting in the written record of her White House service, "executive privilege" will keep it safely out of sight. Before that, apart from a late-nineties stint as head of the Texas Lottery Commission under then Governor Bush, she devoted herself to the interests of corporate clients (and of Bush, from the earliest flaps about his National Guard service right up through the Florida recount). When it comes to overt indications of what she thinks about the Constitution, though, there's no use frisking her. She's clean.

Since inferences are all there will be to go on, every shard that is brought to the surface will be examined with a view to teasing out the maximum possible meaning. Within a day of Miers's nomination, excavators hit what looked like pay dirt. The excitable Drudge Report topped its headline with an animated rotating siren, the equivalent of "Extra!": "harriet miers supported full civil rights for gays and lesbians." Merciful heavens!

Drudge had picked up the item from Time's site, to which it had bubbled up from the Human Rights Campaign, the gay advocacy group. It turned out to refer to a short questionnaire sent out by the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas to candidates for city office in 1989, the year that Harriet Miers, in her only foray into public service outside the direct patronage of George W. Bush, was elected to a single two-year term on the city council. Sure enough, to the question "Do you believe that gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as non-gay men and women?" she had answered "Yes."

But then hardly anyone is for depriving gays of civil rights--just "special rights." And this:

Do you, as an individual citizen, support repeal of Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code which criminalizes the private sexual behavior of consenting adult lesbians and gay men?, No.

Section 21.06 happens to be the same law that the Supreme Court struck down two years ago in Lawrence v. Texas. Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the three who voted to uphold it, nevertheless wrote that it was "silly," adding, "If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it." Or, as Drudge might headline it: "harriet miers supported 'silly' law that even thomas wants to repeal."