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Harriet Miers Withdraws Name from Consideration; New Orleans Residents Tour Damaged Homes by Bus

Aired October 27, 2005 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Backing out. Saving face or protecting the privacy of the president's counsel? Get the back room details of the news that's rocking the nation's capital and what's next.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't like this, being on a bus. I'm only here because of my mama.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: Emotions run high in the lower Ninth Ward. Residents see their homes for the first time since Katrina. We're live from New Orleans.

And she's the Michael Jordan of women's basketball, and she's gay. We'll talk to hoop heroine Cheryl Swoopes live about her life, her love and why she's going public.

From the CNN Center in Atlanta I'm Kyra Phillips. CNN's LIVE FROM starts right now.

She was an unknown quantity, a presidential confidant or crony, depending on your politics, a corporate lawyer with no judicial background and no luck at winning over critics on Capitol Hill and beyond. She's Harriet Miers. And if you've been watching CNN you know her troubled 24-day-old Supreme Court nomination is history. It's the story of the day: politics, principles, prospective future candidates who, by the way, will be vetted by the White House counsel. Yes, Harriet Miers.

How the Miers nomination fell apart depends on who you talk to. The nominee and the president insist the crux was executive privilege, lawyer-client confidentiality and separation of powers. Many others say it was a political miscalculation, pure and simple.

CNN congressional correspondent Ed Henry joins me with the back story while he digs for the next big nugget. And it's very interesting Harriet Miers actually will have to carry on what she once represented, Ed, and are there any women in the mix?

ED HENRY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: There sure are. She is going to be right in the middle, back on Capitol Hill, having to deal with selling a new nominee in the near future. And the bottom line is intrigue and it was really -- the speculation was swirling after a meeting in the capitol yesterday. A very high-level meeting between Texas Senator John Cornyn and some of the White House advisers who were trying to sell this nomination on the Hill and were told that there were some real blunt assessments there. That the bottom line is they realized and were finally acknowledging the obvious, that conservative opposition was really building.

There was fear among conservatives that this was another David Souter, someone who was being billed as a conservative but really was going to wind up on the high court as a moderate. Also, that the one- on-one meetings with senators, they turned out to be disastrous, and also that a serious of White House missteps had actually poured some gasoline on the fire.

So everybody knew there was trouble, but to give you an idea of what a shock it was that it was actually pulling herself out, pulling the nomination this morning, Senator John Cornyn, who had that meeting yesterday and told me afterwards he was still confident she would make it through the hearings on November 7, he says today that he learned the news from CNN this morning that she was pulling the nomination. No advanced word to Republicans here on the Hill.

That's because late last night Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist finally called White House chief of staff Andy Card, suggested they did not have the votes to get her nomination through.

Here's Senator Frist.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BILL FRIST (R-TN), MAJORITY LEADER: She felt that withdrawal was in the best interest of the United States of America. She came to this decision on her own, based on what she has experienced and witnessed and with a requests that are currently being made and as she projected forward as to the hearings. Again, the best interest of the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: And what are Democrats saying? They basically cannot contain their glee. They've been watching on the sidelines, looking at all this intra-party fights on the Republican side, and they see that it's building even more now. They see disarray on the Republican side.

And Democrats are also trying to shape the battle over whoever is picked to replace Harriet Miers. They're trying to say that this happened because conservatives rose up and that the president now is going have to go hard right with the next pick to please his political base.

Here's Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), MINORITY LEADER: Mr. President, I believe without any question when the history books are written about all this that it will show that the radical right wing of the Republican Party drove this woman's nomination right out of town.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: Now, top Republicans up here are objecting to that characterization. They say, correctly, that in fact there were a lot of Democrats who were holding their fire a bit, but knew that they were very likely to end up opposing Harriet Miers over issues like abortion, but the bottom line is those Democrats never really got to give those speeches.

They never really, obviously, are going to be able to vote on this nomination, because Republicans did the work for them. That's why there was so much trouble between the White House and the Senate Republicans. This will be very interesting to see how President Bush repairs that. He has a real choice here.

He's already wounded by this fight, by Iraq, by the CIA leak case, where we're expecting possible indictments tomorrow. What does he do? Does he try to go to the middle and bring the country together or does he go to the right and feel that he needs to get his base behind him to get ready for all of these other battles he has to weigh?

The problem is if he does go hard right, he's very likely to spark a filibuster right, Democrats already throwing the filibuster word already privately. If that were to happen, then the president all of a sudden has yet another distraction to add to his plate, an already full plate, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: All right. Ed Henry from the Hill. Thank you so much.

Conservatives feared another Souter and may have pulled off a Bork, had Miers gone to a vote. Democrats fear another Thomas, Scalia, whom President Bush once held up as models for future nominees. Should the president fear a cavalcade of second-term setbacks like so many of his predecessors?

Joining me with thoughts on all this is syndicated columnist, university professor, Steve Roberts and commentator and foundation president, Bay Buchanan. Great to have you both.

BAY BUCHANAN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you.

STEVE ROBERTS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Nice to be here.

PHILLIPS: Bay, let's start with you. What was the president thinking?

BUCHANAN: When he appointed Miers?

PHILLIPS: Correct. BUCHANAN: I think what he did is he had somebody who was a confidant and a friend and he had great confidence. I don't think he was thinking of the big picture. The Supreme Court of the United States is not just for friends, even as competent a corporate attorney as she might have been.

And also, he was not thinking about the conservatives and his promise and his commitment to him, and that is who elected him, to give us somebody that we -- would interpret that Constitution. This is the heart of our passion. This is what makes us get out there and be active, is that court and the judges. And he's been appointing some terrific ones to the federal court, but we need the Supreme Court, and so I think that was his mistake right there.

PHILLIPS: Steve, let me ask you this. There are a number of conspiracy theories coming out now saying, look, here was a woman that didn't have a lot of experience. The president just said trust me. It created a lot of debate. So the conspiracy types are saying, was this a fake from the very beginning?

ROBERTS: No. I don't think it was a fake. I think this president has long looked to his key confidants, his closest friends, to key jobs. I was surprised he backed down as quickly as he did.

But what Bay has indicated is something important. Let's be honest here. The president says there's no litmus test for the Supreme Court, but what Bay and her friends have done is, in fact, create a litmus test. They say, "We want a sure vote against abortion. We want a sure vote in favor of school prayer and against same sex marriage. We don't want someone with an open mind. We want someone with a clear record."

So even no matter how much the president says "no litmus test," we just heard that, in fact, they do want a litmus test.

The other thing that is very important here is the whole notion of legislating from the bench. The president says, "I don't want someone who legislates from the bench." But as Bay just said, that's exactly what they want.

Sixty-five percent of Americans tell pollsters that they do not want Roe v. Wade overturned. You could never get that through the Congress. But what the conservatives want is the fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, to do through the courts what they cannot do through the legislature. In other words, they want to do exactly what they say they don't want to do, which is have someone legislate from the bench.

PHILLIPS: Bay, let's talk about Roe v. Wade for a moment, because they were all...

BUCHANAN: Sure.

PHILLIPS: ... James Dobson and a number of these men and women of faith came forward, talking about, you know, would she overturn it, would she not overturn it? The president came forward and said, "She's a woman of faith. She's a strong Christian. That's one of the reasons why I love her so much."

Peggy Noonan writes in one of her editorials when talking about, you know, sort of the issue of Christianity and being a strong Christian and Roe v. Wade and how she would feel about that, causing people to be skeptical. And then she's, "By the time of the hearings she'll have been painted as the church lady." There's a great old American tradition of not really liking the church lady.

BUCHANAN: You know, there was a real problem that the president had after he appointed her. Because she didn't have a record, those of us who do very much care and believe in the life of the unborn and that it should be respected, we wanted to see something. Where does she stand? What was her judicial philosophy?

And because she didn't have a record, in order to try to tell us what it was, they winked and nodded and said she's a -- you know, she's a Christian. Well, I know a lot of Christians who are pro- choice, so that wasn't good enough for a lot of us. We wanted more. James Dobson said he believed it.

But then we read yesterday in the "Washington Post" that he gave a speech in 1993 where she was very much taking a pro-choice position. I think that that was the straw that broke the camel's back. You were going to have people who have said they support her I believe they would have backed off, such as James Dobson, when they read that article. I think that's what moved this whole thing.

But the president was not wise. I think it was his initial reaction to move somebody forward, his initial position to move someone forward that did not have any kind of record that would make us feel comfortable that they were conservatives who would interpret the Constitution. That's who we want, to interpret the Constitution, have that judicial philosophy, not the activists, and then we'll be quite comfortable.

PHILLIPS: And she -- you said something about self- determination, Steve. You said no, the real issue is that she stood up and talked about self-determination. And it's funny that you said that, Steve, because I think of Rosa Parks. That's the name of her institute in Detroit. It's the Institute for Self-Determination.

ROBERTS: Well, you know, the fact is that Harriet Miers -- Bay was reading the situation correctly, I think. That Harriet Miers was not a doctrinaire conservative on these issues, that when she said self-determination in that speech that that means that she basically thought a woman had a right to determine for herself key issues like abortion, key issues like same-sex marriage, key issues like school prayer. And she is right that Harriet Miers was a far more flexible, far more open minded person than conservatives want on the court.

This do not -- you know, this notion that they want a strict constructionist; they don't want someone to interpret the law. That's not what they want. What they want is a vote on their side. That's all they care about. Bay has made that very clear.

And Harriet Miers was not an automatic vote on their side. I agree with Bay. She is a far more open minded and flexible person than conservatives wanted. They didn't want open minded; they didn't want flexible. They wanted a down the line loyalist, and that's what they're going to try to push the president to do next time.

PHILLIPS: Let me ask you guys real quickly, because unfortunately we're out of time, but as we're talking about the president and conservatives feel dissed and this was a big debate and feeling sorry for everybody. Should we feel sorry for Harriet Miers? Was this embarrassing? I mean, my heart goes out to her. This was hard for her.

BUCHANAN: Kyra, I couldn't agree more. When I first thought, my first thought was, you know, this is a tough couple of months, couple of weeks for her. Terribly tough decision, but she made the right decision. I think she saw that this is nothing compared to what was going to happen in those hearings.

When you're not qualified, when you don't come with a judicial philosophy, when you can't answer the tough questions, things you can't learn in 30 days, no matter how smart you are, she was going to be embarrassed, I believe, and I think she could feel that through all of these mock hearings.

PHILLIPS: Steve, what do you think?

ROBERTS: Well, you know, when the president said trust me, Harriet Miers trusted the president, trusted his political instincts. Presidents -- I think would have gotten this nomination a year ago when all Republicans were rallying around Bush as he sought a second term.

Political landscape, very, very different today. Republicans on the Hill looking to their own political future, running for president themselves. Conservatives no longer have to worry about backing George Bush for a second term. And so she trusted the president's instincts, but in many ways it was the president's political instincts that were off, not understanding the difference between a first and a second term.

PHILLIPS: Steve Roberts, Bay Buchanan, great conversation. Thank you both.

BUCHANAN: Sure.

PHILLIPS: Thank you so much.

Straight ahead, we've seen the damage from the air, and today the residents are seeing their homes in New Orleans' devastated Ninth Ward from behind the windows of a bus.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thousand of tourists flock to Maine each fall to catch a glimpse of nature's beauty, but how about calling the Pine Tree State home?

"Money" magazine selects Brunswick, Maine, as one of the best places to retire.

CYBELE WEISSER, WRITER, "MONEY": Having that sort of picturesque, small town feel is very important to a lot of people, and you really get that community sense. It's great for retirees. One of the slight deterrents is the cold. The taxes are probably higher than average for other retirement communities.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Brunswick is home to nationally renowned Bowden College, a small liberal arts school with plenty to offer seniors.

WEISSER: Bowden has the Bowden Friends Organization, and at a very low cost senior citizens can join, and what they get out of that is free classes at university, clubs, lectures, sporting events. It's kind of like a town pass.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Back here at B Control, improving the hour is one mayor's take on the aftermath of Wilma in southeast Florida. Food, water and ice in good supply, relatively speaking, and steady progress on the power front. Though hundreds of gas stations still have plenty to sell, but no electricity to run the pumps.

CNN's Rusty Dornin is in Boca Raton.

Hi, Rusty.

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Kyra, you can see the problems all over the four-county area with two million people without power. Here, though, the situation is critical. I'm at Century Village Retirement Community, where more than 20,000 elderly people -- what you're looking at right now is a food line that has been set up. You can't even see the end of the line here that has been set up to help people here who have been without electricity since Wilma hit.

Now for many of these people, of course, they have medication. They have things that have to be refrigerated, and some of them are housebound. They can't get out of their house. They don't even know that the trucks have come here with food.

We also understand that they are running out of food here. So many of the people in this line will not be getting any.

Here to talk with us a little bit about what's been going on in the last few days is Celia Friedman. Celia, tell us, what have you been eating the last couple of days?

CELIA FRIEDMAN, RESIDENT: I've been eating bread and water with jelly.

DORNIN: That's it. Now you've got a lunch, finally.

FRIEDMAN: Now I have lunch. I have apple juice, cookies, and I've got -

DORNIN: You've got some chicken.

FRIEDMAN: A chicken breast and coleslaw.

DORNIN: And this is the only meal you've had...

FRIEDMAN: The only meal, real meal, yes.

DORNIN: What is the situation? I understand a lot of people here who don't even know the truck is here.

FRIEDMAN: Right, right. A lot of people don't know, and I'm bringing this to a friend on the fourth floor who is, you know, with her husband who can't come down. So I will do -- I'll eat my bread and water, OK. I don't mind.

DORNIN: But there are people here who have no idea.

FRIEDMAN: Well, she knows, but she can't come down. She's on the fourth floor. There's no elevators. There's no service. There's -- nobody even told us. If one of my gentleman neighbors walked past my car. I was going try and pick up a prescription.

DORNIN: You can't even do that now.

FRIEDMAN: And he said they're giving out food so I said, "Get in the car." So everybody got in my car. They piled in.

DORNIN: Which is what we've been seeing, too. There have been a lot of folks that have been going around, of course, and picking up other people to bring them down here, but when they run out of food here, the next food truck is not coming until 5 p.m. this afternoon. We understand some ice will be coming.

But one of the problems here is this is a gated community and FEMA does not come into gated communities. So you're got more than 20,000 people here...

FRIEDMAN: Seniors.

DORNIN: Senior. Who have -- many who have serious medical needs who are having some critical problems, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Let's get one thing -- one thing straight, Rusty. They're seniors. She's making that clear to you, and that's her sandwich that you have. Don't forget. Rusty Dornin.

DORNIN: I have to give this back, too.

PHILLIPS: That's right. Don't forget, she wants that back. All right, Rusty Dornin, we'll continue to check in. Obviously, a very serious issue there. No -- definitely joking aside.

But still stinging from Katrina, President Bush is getting his first look at Wilma during his afternoon on the ground in Miami. Mr. Bush also will visit the National Hurricane Center, which is scrambling to keep pace with its busiest season on record.

There was no shortage of disturbing stories to come out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some have proven, others discounted. But Louisiana attorney general Charles Foti says he still hasn't gotten to the bottom of reports that some elderly hospital patients were euthanized in the days after the storm.

He's now issued 73 subpoenas in a probe of these alleged mercy killings at Memorial Medical Center. And according to a doctor and nurse manager at Memorial, staff members held repeated discussions about euthanizing patients that they thought might not survive the ordeal.

Now, after the allegations surfaced, Foti ordered autopsies on all 45 bodies taken from Memorial after the storm.

Meanwhile, the road to recovery in New Orleans is a rocky one, especially for residents of the lower Ninth Ward. Today, survivors of Katrina's fury are being allowed to visit their old neighborhoods, but there's a big fat catch.

CNN's Daniel Sieberg joins us live from New Orleans and, Daniel, as you and I were talking, folks not happy with the situation, for sure.

DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kyra. It's a very sort of tense situation here at times, very emotional. Residents of the lower Ninth Ward were allowed for the first time today to be on a bus.

And I think I can actually hear some of the buses behind me just pulling back in for one of the tours. People were allowed to get on the bus and tour the affected areas by Katrina and the flooding there, some of the most heavily damaged areas in New Orleans. They had to stay on the bus, though. They were discouraged from getting off the bus.

The folks here, the officials said part of the reason for that was that a lot of the homes are not structurally safe. They're actually still recovering bodies from the area, as well.

But of course, very tough for some of these people to see their homes for the first time, in many cases.

Joining us now are a couple of these lower Ninth Ward residents. I want to introduce them: to my left here, Dionne Robteau and Desiree Nailor. Very deep ties to the community here, Desiree, your home, one of the ones you saw for the first time. What was that like?

DESIREE NAILOR, NEW ORLEANS RESIDENT: It was devastating. You know, but I realize I have a life. I can go on, you know. And we just have to be strong. It was just hard seeing it, all the houses down around me down and that house up, but we've got to move on, you know. That's all I can say.

SIEBERG: Dionne, your mother's home is in this area, as well?

DIONNE ROBTEAU, NEW ORLEANS RESIDENT: Yes.

SIEBERG: What was that like for you on this tour? Do you think it was a good idea for these tours to go through or it was almost too hard to see it?

ROBTEAU: It's a good idea from the tour, but it's sad. It's really sad. We've just got to pray for those who lost theirs and ask God to give them strength and hold on. One day it will get better. I know it will.

SIEBERG: You guys are family members. You're cousins. What's it like for the rest of your family to go through this? I mean, it's got to be still such a hard experience to recover from.

NAILOR: It is. It is. But you know, we're just going to keep going and praying, you know, and keeping ourselves strong and together. You know?

SIEBERG: And I know, Desiree, you have one thing you wanted to do at very end here. We're going to let you go ahead. You are a professional singer, you pointed out to me earlier.

NAILOR: Yes, I am. I wanted to send this to the Ninth Ward area particularly and to the world.

(singing) Gotta go on and live our lives and don't be afraid to dry those tears from my eyes. Gotta be strong and carry on, no matter what happens. It's going to be all right.

SIEBERG: Great. Guys, thank you so much for talking with us.

So, Kyra, a lot of emotion here as people get a chance to see some of the damage for the first time. Back to you.

PHILLIPS: Oh, my gosh. Daniel, I have chills. Is Desiree standing next to you by chance?

SIEBERG: She's just walked away, actually.

PHILLIPS: She did? I was going to try and talk her into singing us to break. But maybe we can do that next time around. It's amazing, though, how music can be extreme therapy for the soul, but we'll continue to check in with you, Daniel. We appreciate that live report. Thank you so much.

And for those who are not from New Orleans, the Ninth Ward is just a name, right? But to its residents and many local historians, it has much greater significance.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): It's less than two miles from the French Quarter, but the Ninth Ward bears little resemblance. It was actually one of the city's last neighborhoods to be developed.

Originally it was a cypress swamp. The land belonged to a few old southern plantations, and after slavery was abolished it became home to freed African-Americans and immigrants who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The area was consistently plagued by flooding and disease.

Construction of the city's canals in the early 1900s improved living conditions in the Ninth Ward, but it also served to isolate the neighborhood from the rest of the city.

By 1950 only half of the lower Ninth Ward was developed. Historians say that the decades-long exodus of white families began in 1960, when Mobile schools were among the first in the nation to be desegregated.

Hurricanes Betsy topped the levees in 1965 and flooded the Ninth Ward, but it did recover that time. The question many are wondering as they drive through their old neighborhood today is will it come back again?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: All right. Let's talk about medical news now. Supply is not keeping up with demand for the antiviral drug that may lessen the bird flu in humans. So now the maker of Tamiflu is putting the brakes on its U.S. shipments.

Swiss drug maker Roche says it's temporarily suspending Tamiflu shipments to wholesalers and private sector businesses in America to make sure that there will be enough treatments to go around during the regular flu season.

Global demand for Tamiflu has spiked on bird flu fears. Roche officials have already limited distribution in other countries, including Switzerland, Germany and Canada, because they didn't want individual people hoarding that drug.

Well, some people say it's better not to rock the boat, but Cheryl Swoopes, on top of the world as the biggest star of women's basketball, a slew of endorsement deals, so now she's going public about her private life. Will she pay the price for her honestly? We'll have the LIVE FROM interview you won't want to miss.

KATHLEEN HAYES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm Kathleen Hayes live from the New York stock exchange. You're paying sky-high gas prices, and big oil is taking home record profits. I'll have that story right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(STOCK REPORT)

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