John Roberts

Headed for the SC, but won’t take the scent off the Turd Blossom

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

7/21/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/roberts.htm

In the end, it won’t matter if Judge John Roberts is conservative or not.

The only thing that really matters is if he is an honest justice or not. If he is, then his votes are going to please liberals, because it is liberal ideals that inform the Constitution, and the laws that the Court rules upon devolve from those liberal ideals.

If he’s a hack, like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, than the United States is going to become a much grimmer and greyer place to live for the 99% of the population who aren’t the beneficiaries of the Scalia brand of Christian fascism.

If he’s honest, then the court has another David Souter. If he’s not, we get another falangist, or a mindless thug like Thomas.

Mind you, the court does get those. Ideologues have been devising litmus tests for Supreme Court candidates dating back to John Jay. (A Tory and a Loyalist prior to the Revolution, Jay probably proved something of a disappointment to his supporters like John Adams who nominated him as first Chief Justice. Not only did he uphold the right of any citizen to sue any other citizen in another state, but he established that the court was to be politically neutral, and never assume any kind of advocacy role. They found a unique way of forcing him off the court, by nominating him for and electing him governor of New York – without his knowledge or consent! Even stranger, to this day he’s considered one of the best governors New York ever had.). But for every Holmes or Thurgood Marshall, there are justices that played the role of benchwarmers, and resulted in decisions like Dred Scott, upholding school segregation, or endowing corporations with legal personhood with full rights.

Despite the Thomases and the Scalias, the court usually maintains fairly high standards, and the Republic muddles through.

It’s unlikely the Senate will cast much light on what sort of justice Roberts will be. They can discuss his record, such as it is, and ask him to clarify remarks made, particularly in some of his dissents. They can ask him how he would rule in cases relating to Roe v. Wade, and he’ll stonewall. It might even be legitimate; judges usually don’t like to say how they’re going to rule in a case when they’ve heard none of the specifics. It’s like asking the head ref at the Super Bowl to come up with a betting line before the game.

Unless something positively radioactive emerges about Roberts, he will be confirmed to the SC. And all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best, something we’ve done with the 119 prior justices nominated to the Court. Usually it works out.

For the media, it’s going to be a disappointing time. They were expecting the battle of the century, and a first term president with the power, popularity and imperious arrogance of Putsch might well have nominated someone like Ken Starr or Janice Brown just because he could and to make liberals scream and despair.

But early in his second term, Putsch is damaged goods, and he has to be a little careful. He took a hard loss to the 14 Moderates in the Senate earlier in the year on the filibuster clash, and they prevented him from brokering a way to get Bolton to the UN. His popularity is in the tank and still falling, with public mistrust of him and his policies growing ever more rapidly.

So he had to be careful in who he selected. He couldn’t put up someone who would piss off the liberals because now the liberals could actually do him political damage over it. Rumor has it that he was considering a couple of women judges for the post, including the non-controversial Edith Brown Clement of the Fifth Circuit. The other was Priscilla Owens, one of the main bones of contention in the filibuster dogfight.

Another rumor has it that he wasn’t planning to announce a nomination for another week or two, but that the mounting pressure of the Karl Rove / Scooter Libby scandal had forced his hand, and he needed something to distract the media.

If that was his aim, then he missed. There’s going to be a wild scramble for the first two weeks or so over the Roberts nomination, and radio hosts and editorial writers will happily chirp about how both sides are gearing up for a battle royale and preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting for or against Roberts (and indeed that has already begun), but the fact is that barring the unforeseen outbreak of radioactivity I mentioned, this is going to be as humdrum a nomination as we are likely to see in these fractious times.

If you had asked me yesterday who John Roberts was, I might have guessed utility infielder for the San Diego Padres. I didn’t even know he was on the short list, and it doesn’t sound like many people did. Even now, I know nothing at all about the man other than a few excerpts from some written rulings of his and his track record in arguing cases before the SC (39 wins, which strikes me as pretty impressive).

And chances are that you, gentle reader, are in the same boat. Like me, you might be darkly suspicious of the whole thing simply because Putsch was behind it, but not willing to make it a death battle without something fairly solid to fight about. Which means the huge political war the White House was hoping would distract from the myriad other problems it faces right now isn’t likely to happen. Certainly the Senate Democrats aren’t going to put up a big fight unless they have something really damning. It’s hard to say for sure they would put up a fight if they DID have something damning.

And the public will be even less interested in it than us. Which means that while Faux and the rest of the VRWC will try to flog life into the story, the rest of us will consign the nomination battle to being a part of the background hum, and that will leave us all free to concentrate on things the administration really wishes we wouldn’t, like the course of the war in Iraq, the economy, the Turd Blossom scandal, and the expected fallout from when the housing market bubble bursts.

So my advice is to keep an eye on the Roberts nomination just in case something big does pop up unexpectedly, but to continue concentrating on all those things the White House was hoping you would ignore in preference for a juicy nomination battle.

Because at this point, it looks like the Roberts nomination, for better or for worse, is going to be pretty cut and dried.