Anyone who”s already at the receiving end of a firehose of hysteria from both the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way–within 24 hours of his nomination–has my vote for U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Besides, U.S. Couirt of Appeals Judge John G. Roberts, Jr., named for the high court by President Bush last night, has sterling credentials (Hugh Hewitt, who worked with Roberts in Ronald Reagan?s White House Counsel?s office during the mid-1980s, has a link to Roberts?s bio on Free Republic.) He?s got a bachelor?s degree and a law degree from Harvard, he served as clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist after graduation (clerkships for Supreme Court justices go only to those at the pinnacle of their law school classes), and he?s been a partner at one of Washington?s top law firms when not serving stints in the Justice Departments under both Reagan and G.H.W. Bush.
It?ll be fun seeing how the Dems get around that kind of resume. Of course it hasn?t stopped the weirdos of the left who are now the Democratic Party base. Roberts has said that the Supreme Court?s abortion decision, Roe vs. Wade, with its medically outdated trimester system for regulating abortion and its reliance on a “privacy” right not in the Constitution, was poorly reasoned–a view that happens to be shared by nearly every legal scholar in the country and many a judge, including the very liberal and very pro-choice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. He also argued to the Supreme Court as deputy solicitor general that protesting outside an abortion clinic does not constitute discrimination against women–a view that the Supreme Court shared when it threw out the clinics? lawsuit against some protesters in 1993. (The IWF, by the way, has no position on abortion, and we have both pro-life and pro-choice women on our board and among our members.)
That makes Roberts a Very Bad Person–so NOW is now branding Roberts as a potential killer of women. Up on the NOW website are bios of seven women who died in supposed illegal abortions from the 1920s to today. (Could NOW find only seven in 80 years? Two of the seven actually perished long after Roe was decided, under parental notification laws and restrictions on federal funding that NOW hates but that the Supreme Court has deemed constitutional.)
PAW has on its website a list of case arguments and judicial decisions of Roberts that it finds “disturbing.” It?s a pretty pathetic list. Roberts, for example, saw nothing wrong with a Texas law making it a crime to burn an American flag, or a District of Columbia ordinance that allowed juveniles to be arrested for eating on the subway, which is against the law in the District and almost everywhere else.
?Twill be interesting to see what the Dems do with all this material–or non-material. Do they really intend to stand on the Senate floor for days haranguing that Roberts is “out of the mainstream?” As Hewitt reports, Dem Rep. Charles Schumer has already outlined the Dem strategy:
“There?s no question that Judge Roberts has outstanding legal credentials and an appropriate legal temperment and demeanor. But his actual judicial record is limited to only two years on the D.C. Circuit Couirt. Fot the rest of his career he has been arguiong cases as an able lawyer for others leaving many of his personal views unknown.”
So the idea is for the Senate Dems to grill Roberts mercilessly, especially about Roe, which he has said was “wrongly decided,” and hope that he?ll put his foot in his mouth sometime down the line so he can be sold to the public as a neo-Robert Bork. That will presumably spare them the sure-to-be mortifying filibuster attempt.
I say: Good luck.