Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Manuel Miranda
By Srinivas Rao, George Washington University
Monday April 23, 2007
Every war has its crimes, its injustices, and, of course, its war criminals. The culture war is no different—case in point, the sordid tale of former Republican staffer and conservative activist Manuel Miranda.
Before his attempts to repeal the 14th Amendment, his guerilla war against the judiciary committee, and the infamous “memogate,” “Manny” was—as many conservative hacks start out—a Democrat. Once a Cuban residing in Spain, Miranda moved to Queens, New York, at age seven in the 1960s, where he started on a path to the proverbial American Dream as an immigrant and a liberal.
That all changed in the 1970s, though, as Miranda was increasingly influenced by his faith in God and Ronald Reagan. By the time he entered Georgetown University in 1978, Miranda was a radical conservative and a devout Catholic. And he let his politics show. While at the school, Miranda founded the conservative political group the Stewards Society, dedicated to little more than explaining the greatness of Georgetown. The society is almost universally reviled on campus as a symbol of unnecessary elitism. Exhibit A: The organization is only open to males, and has had an ongoing problem with women on campus. The Stewards have ties to the campus’ conservative paper, The Georgetown Academy, to which Miranda was a frequent contributor.
Miranda graduated from Georgetown in 1982 and headed for law school—but, as all members of this secret society know, “there’s no such thing as an ex-Steward.” Miranda has had an ongoing fascination with Georgetown University politics. He remained the legal and business adviser to The Georgetown Academy well into the 2000s and still uses its pages as a soapbox to insult the student columnists of Georgetown’s newspaper of record, The Hoya. One target, Tim Haggerty, argued in The Hoya that it’s time for Miranda to move on to bigger fish. “Miranda has no excuse. His sophomore year began the day I was born.” It was this unhealthy attraction to Georgetown that won Miranda The Georgetown Voice’s “Best Creepy Alum” award in 2003.
Take any controversial issue at Georgetown, and Miranda can be found on the wrong side of it. From justifying the stealing of 5,000 copies of The Georgetown Voice (the liberal alternative weekly on campus) to militating for the replacement of the current student government with the elitist “Yard,” Miranda has gone out of his way to become politically active on a campus that he graduated from 25 years ago.
After graduating from law school in 1986, Miranda worked for a series of law firms in D.C. and New York where he quickly grew a reputation for being overly aggressive. In 1989, for instance, Manny was arrested when he crashed a meeting of the Georgetown alumni association on the behalf of his client. When he was thrown out of the meeting, he responded by suing the school for trampling on his civil rights. Federal judge Harold Greene dismissed the case four years later.
“It is clear as a matter of law that the actions taken by the various defendants were legal,” said Judge Greene. “Notwithstanding plaintiff’s effort to portray this case in apocalyptic terms as if it were an overriding human rights or civil rights struggle on a par with those of Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela rather than a relatively pedestrian disagreement between groups of alumni, the issue before the Court is not complex.”
In 1998, Miranda became head of the Cardinal Newman Society, whose sole purpose was to fight in the burgeoning culture war on Catholic college campuses like Georgetown. And his obsession with his alma mater continued: From his new position of power, he launched a campaign to impugn the personal morality of then-Georgetown President Leo O’Donovan. Miranda was also instrumental in the creation of the Georgetown’s anti-feminist student group, the Women’s Guild—despite the fact that Miranda was neither a student nor a woman at the time.
Miranda’s work as an activist for the religious right—as well as his unusual position as an ethnic minority in the Republican Party—got him a job in the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) in 2001, and a position as top counsel to Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) in 2003. While the former senate majority leader had plans for his new aide (within his first year, Frist asked Miranda to devise “a Hispanic agenda for the Senate”) Miranda quickly took a liking to the battle over court nominations.
His tenure in Frist’s office gained him a reputation for playing hardball politics, what one Democratic staffer called a “scorched-earth approach” to the judiciary. Miranda did not hesitate to compare the then-Democratic minority to TV racist Archie Bunker and claimed that all Democrats, regardless of religion, were anti-Catholic because of their views on abortion. He was the first to suggest banning the filibuster for judicial nominees, a circumvention of Senate procedures without precedent in over 50 years.
Miranda’s coup de grace, however, was the “reverse filibuster.” In a stunning display of democracy, Miranda posited that if Republicans staged a 30-hour “debate” on the Senate floor their Democratic counterparts would have to stay up with them through the night. One senator from each party would man the floor while the others slept; if the Democrat on duty fell asleep, Republicans could then sneak through a vote on judicial nominees without the necessary 60 votes for cloture. In the end, the move did not produce a single judge and Miranda was personally embarrassed when it was leaked that the filibuster had been expressly coordinated with Fox News.
Not discouraged, Miranda changed tactics from parliamentary technicalities to unethical spying. In November 2003, internal memorandums from the Democrats were leaked to the press, detailing the party’s strategy on judicial nominations. While the revelations were ugly—one memo had a Democratic staffer claiming that most of Bush’s nominees were “Nazis”—they were hardly criminal. The investigation quickly turned to the memos themselves: How did they get into the media, anyway?
Enter Miranda. On Feb. 9, 2004, less than a year after taking the job, Manuel Miranda resigned his post as aide to Frist, claiming that he did not want “to distract the majority leader from pursuing the needed legislative agenda for the American people.” Miranda revealed that he had retrieved the memos through a glitch in the Senate computer system that allowed him unfettered access to the computers of Democrat staffers on the Judiciary Committee. While his Republican coworkers were unwilling to use the glitch for political gain, Manny had no problem accessing the documents. He maintains, however, that he did not leak the documents to the media—a dubious claim at best, seeing as one of the primary recipients of the leaked memos, Sean Rushton, was also a member of the Stewards Society at Georgetown. At the same time, Miranda argues that it was his legal right and moral obligation to spy on his Democratic colleagues. When asked if he broke the rules of common courtesy by reading other people’s mail, Miranda remains on the offensive. “My parents never taught me not to read other people’s mail. They always read my mail.”
The following months were hard on Miranda. Already unemployed, top Republicans were adding insult to injury by publicly denouncing his actions. Even Hatch, who had called Miranda “one of my good friends and colleagues in the cause for truth and justice” in the past, now said he was “mortified [by] this improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files.” Miranda tried to get a job in the private sector with conservative lobbying firm McDermott, Will, and Emery but was ultimately rejected. He unsuccessfully attempted to sue the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee over the incident. (Miranda claims that Democrats called potential employers and warned them against hiring him, but members of the firm, unsurprisingly, cited the ongoing investigation into his unethical behavior as their reason.)
It seemed that the sun was setting on the career of this conservative activist; discredited in the media and shamed out of his job in Congress, it was unlikely he would ever again be in the public eye. But Miranda, unable to find a job in the private sector, returned to political work. Only months after he left Frist’s office, he began organizing the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters, hoping to get grassroots support for the so-called nuclear option that he had pioneered during his tenure in Frist’s office. It worked: Frist was able to force Democrats to rescind their threats to filibuster controversial judicial nominees. The infrastructure Miranda built for that campaign quickly turned into the Third Branch Conference, which focuses on nominating socially conservative justices to the courts. It was Miranda’s organization, using his connections throughout the conservative movement, which was credited with derailing the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
The Third Branch Conference is an organization in the loosest sense of the term. Miranda refers to himself as “the chairman” of the group, but in practice he is its only active member. He works out of his home in Washington, making conference calls and sending mass emails to conservative activists. He admits that he is “a one-man operation”—a concession that, in reality, the Third Branch Conference is just another name for Manny Miranda.
By 2006, conservative outrage over Miranda’s unethical behavior in memogate had all but disappeared—while his conduct was reprehensible, the Democrats and Harriet Miers were worse. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, the American Conservative Union honored Miranda with the Ronald Reagan Award for his work in getting Samuel Alito nominated to the Supreme Court. Miranda was introduced as “more than just a principled conservative. He’s a man that doesn’t know the meaning of surrender.”
Miranda now has a new target in mind: immigration reform. His new organization, Families First on Immigration, proposed a radical deal between social and fiscal conservatives on the issue—total amnesty for illegal immigrants living inside of the country, while amending the Constitution to ban birthright citizenship. (So far, the move has received little traction). Some might say that making permanent changes to the 14th amendment is ill-advised, but not to this political fighter. Miranda will push his ideological agenda no matter what the cost. Look out—armed with a teleconference and a disregard for civility, Manuel Miranda could be coming for you next.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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Comments
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Another Right Winnger
— patandJohn Beam - Apr 27, 06:26 PM - #Right Winger
— patandJohn Beam - Apr 27, 06:27 PM - #A hatchet job if I’ve ever seen one. Miranda is an aggressive tactician, rather than the unethical hack described here.
— Chuck Bartowski - Dec 19, 12:17 AM - #Miranda is your typical extremist conservative. He took an extraordinaly well paid job at the US Embassy in Iraq as a “rule of law” advisor, replying to the favor with a scathing condemnation of our diplomats as being out of their league, failing to note that almost all of the failed policies he criticized were ones imposed by the White House.
— Chris W - Feb 13, 03:20 PM - #It was amusing to read this hit piece when it was first brought to my attention in my fourth month in Iraq. It was a few days after we lost some colleagues from a shelling of the Embassy compound so I opted not to finish reading, in part because it was so poorly written and mostly plagiarized.
The opinions and biases are as solid as the facts. Some corrections are here:
-I never argued for the repeal of the 14th amendment, only the proper reading in law and policy of the Citizenship Clause. I never argued for blanket amnesty of illegal immigrants, only the families of birthright citizens.
— Manuel Miranda - Feb 29, 10:07 AM - #-I became a Republican in 1988, not 1978. I was a social justice activist thru college.
-I was on the board and later National President of the Cardinal Newman Society for Catholic Higher Education, hence my advocacies at Georgetown, America’s first Catholic college, opposed by anti-Catholic liberals
-I graduated law school in 1987, not 1986.
-We won the lawsuit first discussed, and GU settled handsomely.
-The 40 hour grand debate on judges was coordinated with the minority so that each party split each hour evenly. It resulted in over 2/3s of Americans polled favoring the Republican position that nominees should get a fair vote and not be filibustered.
-I never sued Democrats.
-The 150 or more grasstop leaders who make up the Third Branch Conference are listed in various postings.
-The award of the Ronald Reagan was more for leading the opposition to Harriet Miers, not for the nomination of Sam Alito.
-I was in Iraq working for the State Department for four months when this bright light thought my past immigration efforts were news enough to assail me without even a call.
Oh, I should add that I did not begin to warm to Ronald Reagan until i heard speech on June 8, 1982. As I got older, he got smarter.
— Manuel Miranda - Feb 29, 10:11 AM - #