Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 23, 1990 TAG: 9007230094
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Dole's comment came not long before Bush held an unusual Sunday evening session at the White House with top advisers to discuss a replacement for William J. Brennan Jr., who sent Bush a surprise letter Friday evening resigning from the court after nearly 34 years.
Bush advisers said the president was well aware that the decision has the potential to split the country on the issue of abortion and upset the careful balance Bush has struck to keep his base of conservative supporters even as he reached out to more moderate ones.
"The president knows that this is where the rubber meets the road," said a top counselor to Bush.
White House advisers said Bush was narrowing the field, trying to find someone philosophically in tune with his conservative positions, including restrictions on abortion, but whose views on the 1973 decision establishing the right to an abortion, Roe vs. Wade, were, as one adviser put it, "a little fuzzed up."
"What the president wants is an absolutely unquestioned conservative, a good judge who is not known as having a national position on the abortion issue, who is not hard-core and clear on the issue of Roe vs. Wade," said a senior Bush adviser.
His advisers said that while Bush would like to make a bold choice, perhaps picking a female or Hispanic nominee, his first priority is choosing someone who has impressive credentials and who does not have a well-known position against abortion.
Reflecting the views of some White House officials, Dole, an opponent of abortion, argued that a nominee's views on abortion should not serve as the sole criterion for selection. The issue, Dole indicated, was emotionally charged for both sides.
"If you have to have someone who wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it's going to be a blood bath getting the nomination confirmed, and the same is true on the other side," Dole said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
On the CBS News program "Face the Nation," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee that must hold hearings on the nominee, called the appointment the most important made by any president since the New Deal era and said Bush would "shape the course of the Supreme Court well into the next century."
Bush's advisers urged him to make the decision quickly to put behind him all speculation about blood baths and to get the announcement out of the way before Congress recesses Aug. 6.
They said that while he had no warning of the resignation by Brennan, 84, he had been quietly considering nominees because of the advanced age of some justices.
Senior aides to Attorney General Dick Thornburgh huddled at the Justice Department, even as the president's counsel, C. Boyden Gray, held meetings at the White House. Sunday's review was not intended to whittle the list of 15 names under consideration, but to bring into focus the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate.
Among those who have been most often cited as potential nominees are Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr and a number of federal appellate judges, including Ralph K. Winter of New York, J. Harvie Wilkinson and William W. Wilkens Jr. of Richmond, Va., Patrick E. Higginbotham of New Orleans, Ferdinand Fernandez of California, David Souter of Boston, Alex Kozinski of San Francisco and Edith Jones of New Orleans.
Present at the Sunday night meeting at the White House were the three advisers who are likely to have the most influence on the outcome: Gray, Thornburgh and Sununu. Vice President Dan Quayle was also at the meeting.
by CNB