President Names Close Advisor as White House Counsel

President Bush continued to reward his closest and most loyal advisors with top jobs Wednesday, naming Deputy Chief of Staff Harriet Miers -- a Texas lawyer who once was his personal attorney -- to be White House counsel.

Miers, 59, will replace Alberto R. Gonzales, whom the president has nominated as attorney general. The White House counsel serves as in-house lawyer to the president, and does not require Senate confirmation.

In a statement, Bush described Miers as “one of America’s finest lawyers.”

“Harriet Miers is a trusted advisor, on whom I have long relied for straightforward advice,” Bush said. “Harriet has the keen judgment and discerning intellect necessary to be an outstanding counsel.”

Also Wednesday, Bush officially named his top domestic policy advisor, Margaret Spellings, as his nominee for secretary of Education, to replace Rod Paige. The Senate is expected to approve her nomination easily when the new congressional session begins in January.

“The issue of education is close to my heart. And on this vital issue, there is no one I trust more than Margaret Spellings,” Bush said in a ceremony in the White House Roosevelt Room.

Miers came to Washington with Bush from Texas, serving first as White House staff secretary and then as deputy chief of staff. She has been one of the president’s most loyal but least visible top aides: As staff secretary, she managed daily operations inside the West Wing, including the paper flow to the president. As deputy chief of staff for policy, she oversaw domestic policy development. Along the way, she earned a reputation as a devoted and meticulous associate.

“She’s 100% loyal and dependable,” a former White House staffer said.

In Texas, Miers had a prominent legal career. A former at-large member of the Dallas City Council, she was co-managing partner at the law firm of Locke Liddell & Sapp and was the first woman to head both the Texas State Bar and the Dallas Bar Assn. As governor, Bush named her to head the Texas Lottery Commission, a position she held from 1995 until 2000.

Miers also is responsible for introducing Bush to Gonzales, whom she got to know when he was a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins and served as board director of the Texas State Bar. When Bush was elected governor, he asked Miers to recommend candidates -- especially minorities -- for general counsel. Gonzales, a Latino, was one of the names Miers forwarded to Bush.

“The governor interviewed Al. They hit it off famously, and they have been very close ever since,” said Roland Garcia, a partner at Miers’ Texas firm.

Spellings also has been with Bush since his Texas days. She was government relations director for the Texas School Boards Assn. before joining Bush’s gubernatorial campaign in 1994 as political director. As the governor’s senior advisor for education policy, she developed the proposals that later became the centerpiece of the president’s signature No Child Left Behind Act.

Congressional Democrats and some state governments say the administration has undermined the bipartisan consensus on No Child Left Behind by failing to fund the reforms. But even administration critics do not blame Spellings for that failure; instead, they said her nomination offered an opportunity to improve implementation of the bill, especially since she had experience at the state level.

“Margaret enjoys a lot of support from both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill,” said James Manley, spokesman for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who rallied Democratic support for the bill but later complained that the White House reneged on funding promises. “Sen. Kennedy has a lot of respect for Margaret’s abilities, and it’s obvious she has the ear of the president.”

There was little immediate indication of how Miers was likely to approach the job of White House counsel.

Under Gonzales, the office played a central and controversial role in developing the administration’s legal policies. For instance, the counsel’s office promoted the practice of designating suspected terrorists as “enemy combatants” who could be held without charges or access to lawyers. Another is the policy of denying prisoner-of-war status to people picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan -- something that human rights groups say violates the Geneva Convention. Both policies have been rebuffed by the courts.

Gonzales’ office has also aggressively asserted executive privilege -- the notion that the president’s personal staff should be shielded from public scrutiny in order to provide unvarnished advice -- in several high-profile incidents, including requests from the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview administration officials and requests for access to the records of an energy task force run by Vice President Dick Cheney. Critics contended that the administration was trying to shroud its work from public view.

Gonzales also ordered a Justice Department memo that in some circumstances would exempt U.S. soldiers and employees from international torture laws in interrogating and detaining suspected terrorists -- a proposed policy that was later disavowed. And his office has played a key role in identifying and vetting Bush’s nominees to the federal bench -- nominees who have often proved controversial on Capitol Hill.

Times staff writer Richard B. Schmitt contributed to this report.