Miers to Face Tougher Time Than Roberts in Hearings

"The Senate hearings are going to be very important," he said.

Her tentative response to a question during a courtesy call on Capitol Hill last week seemed revealing to some observers. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked her to name her favorite justices.

"Warren," she answered, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Leahy was taken aback. Did she mean Chief Justice Earl Warren, the bête noire of conservatives who presided over an activist court? Or maybe his successor, Warren E. Burger, a moderate conservative who voted for Roe v. Wade and rarely makes any scholar's list of top justices?

Burger, she answered.

The Judiciary Committee has not scheduled hearings yet, but officials expect them to be held in early November. They can be arduous even for the most prepared nominee; Roberts spent 22 hours in the witness chair over a week.

While historically many justices had not served as judges, none has been nominated to the Supreme Court since 1971 without experience on the bench, and Miers's career as a Texas corporate attorney has not given her a background in the types of issues that regularly go before the court.

The White House will try to compensate for that with a crash course. She will pore through briefing books on key cases and undergo the same sort of murder boards she supervised for Roberts. The process, which will be run by Rachel L. Brand, head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, will include former senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, who will monitor her practices and offer tips on how to answer -- or not answer -- senators' questions.

As a participant in Roberts's preparation, colleagues said, Miers presumably gained not only greater facility with issues likely to be on the agenda but also benefited from helping to refine and revise answers to the toughest questions.

"The great advantage she has is she has the Roberts transcript to study," said H. Christopher Bartolomucci, a former White House associate counsel who participated in a murder board with Roberts. "Not only is that a forecast of the kinds of questions she's likely to get, she can see how they can be answered."

But others suggested the senators would take a different tack with Miers, seeking to demonstrate her unfamiliarity with cases that did not come up during Roberts's hearings.

"If I was a Democrat and I wanted to destroy her candidacy, I'd go to constitutional law professors and experts and get the 60 key Supreme Court decisions," Fein said. The committee members could then go through the list and ask her, " 'Have you read this case from beginning to end?' And when she says for the 59th time, 'No, I haven't,' I'd say, 'Why are you going to be on the Supreme Court?' "

Fein said the White House likely will try to shift the discussion away from legal scholarship and toward biography, much as the first Bush White House did with Clarence Thomas, emphasizing his rise from poverty in Pin Point, Ga. "They'll give her a libretto -- 'you overcame the difficulties as a woman in a masculine world down in Texas,' " he said. "They'll try to paint her as a female Horatio Alger."

The president laid that groundwork in yesterday's radio address, stressing Miers's history as the first woman to be hired at her Texas law firm, the first to become head of a large Texas firm and the first to serve as president of the Dallas and Texas bar associations.

And the White House could try to turn the barrage of attacks on her credentials to her advantage. "One way this actually helps her is it greatly lowers her expectations for the hearings," said a conservative working for her nomination, "and coming on the heels of John Roberts's virtuoso performance, that's actually a good thing. If she exceeds expectations during the hearings, she'll win even more support."

Staff writer Thomas B. Edsall contributed to this report.