I'll keep an open-mind and watch the hearings intently. I may well change my mind and swith to vociferous opposition. However, as of now, having been following the court speculation for some time, I feel that Roberts is a better pick than I was expecting. Either Clement or Garza or Brown or Jones would have been FAR worse. As for Gonzales, we have no idea what to expect - he has very little public record. So we might wind up with a torturer-Souder or a Hispanic Scalia. There's a much bigger record on this guy and for a Bush nominee, this is
relatively good news
First off, let's be realistic - there's no way that Bush was going to nominate someone who was for Roe v. Wade. Additionally, it's hard to tell what Roberts' actual position is, since when he wrote that Roe v. Wade should be overturned he was arguing on behalf of the first Bush administration.
So what we get is clearly someone conservative, but a relatively mainline conservative. He does not, at this point, appear to be a supporter of the "constitution-in-exile"-movement which wants to wipe out the New Deal and return to the court of the 1920s. By most accounts, Roberts has a healthy respect for precedent. He's going to rule against us plenty of times. But that would be the case with ANY Bush nominee. Better we have someone who's at least rational and relatively reasonable - not a right-wing wacko.
Obviously there's going to be a lot of back and forth on this guy. You already have plenty of links to more incriminating profiles on other threads. Here's one that makes me a *little* more hopeful.
This is from a good article Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New Republic some time back which evaluated possible SC nominees. Noting that Bush was going to pick a conservative, Rosen broke the possible nominees down into "the conservative activists," who he said should be filibustered and opposed at all costs, and the more "acceptable" choices, the "principled conservatives." Besides Roberts, other "principled conservatives" Rosen listed included McConnell and Wilkinson (either of whom, IMO, would have been better choices from our p.o.v.). Janice Rogers Brown, Edith Clement, Edith Jones, Samuel Alito, and Garza were grouped into the other.
John Roberts, 49. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., Circuit. Top of his class at Harvard Law School and a former law clerk for Rehnquist, Roberts is one of the most impressive appellate lawyers around today. Liberal groups object to the fact that, in 1990, as a deputy solicitor general, Roberts signed a brief in a case involving abortion-financing that called, in a footnote, for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. But it would be absurd to Bork him for this: Overturning Roe was the Bush administration's position at the time, and Roberts, as an advocate, also represented liberal positions, arguing in favor of affirmative action, against broad protections for property rights, and on behalf of prisoners' rights. In little more than a year on the bench, he has won the respect of his liberal and conservative colleagues but has not had enough cases to develop a clear record on questions involving the Constitution in Exile. On the positive side, Roberts joined Judge Merrick Garland's opinion allowing a former employee to sue the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for disability discrimination. He pointedly declined to join the unsettling dissent of Judge David Sentelle, a partisan of the Constitution in Exile, who argued that Congress had no power to condition the receipt of federal transportation funds on the Metro's willingness to waive its immunity from lawsuits. In another case, however, Roberts joined Sentelle in questioning whether the Endangered Species Act is constitutional under Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. The regulation in question prevented developers from building on private lands in order to protect a rare species of toad, and Roberts noted with deadpan wit that "the hapless toad ... for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California," and therefore could not affect interstate commerce. Nevertheless, Roberts appears willing to draw sensible lines: He said that he might be willing to sustain the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act on other grounds. All in all, an extremely able lawyer whose committed conservatism seems to be leavened by a judicious temperament. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=rosen112904
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