Dan Coats had never met White House Counsel Harriet Miers. But the former Republican senator from Indiana agreed to appear on television to endorse Miers’ nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court when the Bush administration assured him Fox News host Brit Hume would be a friendly interviewer. “Of course, his first question was, ‘Have you met Harriet Miers?’ ” Coats wrote two years later, recalling the experience in the Hamline Journal of Public Law & Policy . Coats answered Hume honestly. And the nomination, he wrote, went downhill from there.
The Obama administration has avoided any similar embarrassment during the first few days of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Court. And to keep up the momentum, there’s no shortage of lessons to be learned from those who, like Coats, have tried to guide potential justices up the mountain of Senate confirmation.
