Is Chivalry Dead in Texas?
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
Forget Kansas — what’s the matter with Texas?
Most guys get in trouble for talking smack about their ex-girlfriends. But down in the Lone Star State, if you say a few nice things about your ex-girlfriend, you can get in trouble too. This is most likely to happen if you’re a judge, you said those things in 120 interviews with the media, and your ex-girlfriend was seeking an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court at the time.
Remember Nathan L. Hecht, the Texas Supreme Court justice who rushed to the aid of his erstwhile paramour, White House Counsel Harriet Miers, during her disastrous SCOTUS nomination? Well, now he’s being dragged before the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct. The Commission is tsk-tsking him for trying to be a good ex-boyfriend, claiming that his public statements about Miers violated the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, which forbids judges from “advanc[ing] the private interests of the judge or others.”
More details, after the jump.
Wonkette operatives have turned up an interesting fillip in the Harriet Miers-Nathan Hecht-Priscilla Owen bizarre love triangle: “The Harriet effect.” Speaking of the mid-1990s , when Owen first joined Hecht on the Texas Supreme Court, our operative reports:
Court watchers can dither over Harriet Miers’s qualifications or lack thereof — but what does it say about her that her strongest proponent (next to the President) is her ex? Nathan Hecht has been barn-storming on her behalf since the announcement, popping up in every form of media possible as well as, more literally, popping up from the pew: Yesterday, he led a standing ovation for Miers at the former couple’s evangelical church (her second church of the day!) as the pastor joked, “Nathan is going to write a new book about dating. I think Harriet’s going to co-author it.” 
Curiouser and curiouser: Harriet Miers’s one-time squeeze, Nathan Hecht, also used to date would-be SCOTUS nom and left-wing boogeywoman Priscilla Owen. Say this about Hecht, he has a type. From Texas we hear conflicting reports about the sizzliness of the hookups. One correspondent contends that Hecht and Miers didn’t date so much as take each other to dinner: “I clerked for the Court during one of the terms that he was on it. Seeing them together, it was hard to imagine (both difficult and nauseating) them being intimate because both seemed so stiff. (And not stiff in the fun way.)” Another operative insists that it got (ahem) ugly, and that Owens and Miers had a “catfight” over their hunk of manmeat, though it’s unclear who won. Did either of them fight like a girl? 
