I've previously written about the strange fact of Harriet Miers extremely low net worth (possibly as little as $220,000 by some accounts). This, in the context of Kos recent post noting her sweetheart Texas land deal, raises even more questions about her suitability for the Supreme Court.
Both here and on the blog, I've been discussing Harriet Miers net worth lately. A couple of days ago, I
noted that despite having spent decades at a major Dallas law firm, many years of which were spent as a managing partner, her net worth could be as low as $220,000 dollars, less than many retired public school teachers.
White House counsel Harriet Miers, President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, has holdings worth between $220,000 and $595,000, her most recent financial disclosure form shows.
This despite the fact that her last year at Dallas firm Locke Liddell and Associates alone, Mier's income was $624,000. Apparently that is greater than her current net worth. Now, it has been widely mentioned that Miers has to care for her ailing mother, and that she gives a significant percentage of her income to the church.
While such behavior is certainly laudable, the question remains, what did she do with the rest of the dough? While caring for an elderly relative can certainly be expensive, it seems unlikely that it could have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
This question gains new importance now in light of Kos' recent revelations about Miers' questionable land deal in Dallas.
Apparently, Miers
Miers collected>more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.
The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.
If Miers' finances seemed questionable before we knew about this land deal, they are even more so now. She had these sweetheart Texas land deals going on, and she's still got such a relatively modest net worth? And will she be striking such deals while on the high court?
And the fact that this was a superfund site raises more questions. A site designated a superfund site by the EPA is one which poses serious environmental dangers. The owner is held to a standard of strict liability for cleanup, which is usually very expensive, sometimes as much as several million dollars.
Since the standard is strict liability, all you have to do is own the property to be liable. So generally, from what I know about superfund sites, you really can't give them away, because the potential liability from the site is so much greater than any value the site would otherwise have.
So that brings us to the million dollar question. Why would the city of Dallas be prepared to pay 10 times the market value to assume such a risk, and what exactly was the risk that was being assumed?