The 3 sides of this issue:
1. Keeping quiet.
"We are keeping quiet. And hiding from the media," wrote Abigail Thernstrom, the Bush-designated vice chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a prominent critic of affirmative-action policies, in an e-mail copied to other members of the network. "As for undermining trust in the president, I am afraid he has accomplished that all on his own-without any help from us." (Asked for comment last week, Thernstrom said she was upset that a "private e-mail exchange ends up in the news media.")
2. Sucking it up.
Others stuck by the president. George Terwilliger, a former top Justice Department official who worked for the GOP on the 2000 Florida election battle, said that 'unless it does violence to one's conscience, I would respectfully suggest that we suck it up and show our support' for the administration.Hardly a ringing endorsement.
3. Outright rebellion
One, Michael A. Carvin, the lawyer who argued the president's case in Bush v. Gore before the Florida Supreme Court, was riled by a newspaper article about Miers. The story reported that Miers had once been quoted saying she wouldn't belong to the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group, because she viewed it as "'activist' and 'partisan'." In an e-mail to the group, Carvin-who did not respond to repeated calls for comment-wrote, "This is becoming more embarrassing as every day passes."and
"It no longer matters whether she's the second coming of John Marshall; the cronyism charge has stuck, bec. [sic] it's so obviously true," wrote Michael Greve, a legal scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Greve wondered what was next. Would Bush, he asked, replace Fed chair Alan Greenspan with "a young lady in the basement of the West Wing who did a terrific job on the TX Railroad Commission [and was the] first Armenian bond trader in Dallas..."
