President Bush's second nominee to the Supreme Court, White House counsel Harriet Miers, has even less of a track record on environmental issues than Chief Justice John Roberts. It thus should come as no surprise that what little is known about her past gives environmentalists even more pause than Chief Justice Roberts' scant paper trail.

This wariness is due in large part to her long working relationship with a president whose own environmental record leaves much to be desired. The 60-year-old Miers has been a staunch Bush loyalist since the president's days as governor of Texas when she was his personal lawyer and counsel to his successful 1994 gubernatorial campaign.

Her unswerving dedication to Bush has been highly visible in the environmental realm as it has in other sectors. She has energetically defended the president's proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil drilling. In the process, she has dutifully parroted the specious administration line that energy development on ANWR'S ecologically incomparable coastal plain would only impact a mere 2,000 out of 19 million protected acres. In reality, the search for an extremely speculative mother lode of oil on the coastal plain would require a network of roads, pipelines and production facilities that would crisscross more than 200 square miles. The effort would despoil the nation's last completely intact ecosystem and its priceless wildlife habitat-perhaps forever.

Miers has been an enthusiastic supporter of Bush's refusal to authorize federal funds to subsidize embryonic stem cell research. She has talked fervently of "reducing the burden of frivolous lawsuits and unnecessary regulation". These are terms that all too often have turned out to be GOP code words for rolling back environmental regulatory safeguards so as to ease overhead costs and boost corporate America's profits.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card has a perfectly rational explanation for Miers being in lock step with the president over the years. He recently described Miers as "not having had any agenda other than the president's."

Because Miers has been a trusted member of Bush's inner circle since the early 90s', one must assume she was giving him a fair amount of advice during his time as governor. The thought is troubling to environmentalists. During Bush's reign, Texas led the nation in factory emissions of toxic and ozone-producing chemicals, including carcinogenic compounds particularly damaging to children's neurological development. While Bush held sway in Austin, 64 percent of Texans lived in areas that failed to meet federal clean air standards. The public interest organization Environmental Defenses conducted a survey of 21 air quality indicators and found that every one of them deteriorated while Bush was in office. It was also determined that Texas refineries emitted three times more pollution than their counterparts in other states.

Just how much Miers had to do with this sorry state of affairs is unclear. But she was at Bush's side while Texas air quality was taking a hit, certainly a relationship that needs to be explored by senators who must vote on her confirmation and are unsure of what her judicial values would be.

Is Miers a passive onlooker who out of fidelity to Bush went along with environmental policies she did not favor? Or has she been proactive in shaping the president's business-oriented initiatives that have run roughshod over environmental protections?

Is Miers waiting to step out of the president's shadow and be her own person? Or do we assign guilt by association and assume the nation is going to be stuck with a Bush clone in jurist's robes, spouting views that are fast wearing out their welcome?

Let's hope the senators have a pretty good idea what the answers to these questions are by the time they have to vote on her confirmation.

@Copyright 2005, Edward Flattau