I'm not aware of "hundreds" of Supreme Court decisions being reversed by a court of appeals. Or even one. Maybe Farah can give a few examples in his next column....
For a judge being consider for a seat on a federal appellate court, Roe is settled law. Any federal appellate judicial candidate who couldn't follow Roe as precedent shouldn't be approved by the Senate. You don't pick and choose which precedents to follow. As a lower court, you are bound by the decisions of higher courts. That's first year law student stuff.
That is a completely different question from whether that same judge would or should consider Roe as binding precedent on the Supreme Court, because unlike an appellate court, the Supreme Court has the power to reverse Roe.
Conservatives like Farah tick me off because they're not really judicial conservatives at all. They're activist conservatives who think judges should do the "right thing" regardless of what the law is. All he cares about is the result -- does Roe stand, or not? Whether its judicially proper for an appellate judge to make that decision apparently doesn't figure into his thinking.
Roberts gave the exact answer to that question he should have given.
Jarhead is right in post 39. Farah was either not thinking or he believes a judge in a lower court should not be bound by Supreme Court precedent if he has personal views to the contrary. The latter would be a serious breach of the rule of law and judicial professionalism. I suspect he was just not thinking.
His objection about Roberts referring to us as a "Democracy" repeats a similar criticism made by Ann Coulter. This seems to me to be semantic hairsplitting. We often refer to ourselves as a democracy, even though the term is technically inaccurate.
The only really legitimate concern is the lack of writings that allow someone to get a glimpse of Roberts real leanings, which is, I suspect, one of the principal reasons Bush picked him. It may turn out bad--I would include on the list of bad examples a lot more than Kennedy and Souter. I suspect, though, that there is a list that could be drawn up of good outcomes from the appointment of stealth candidates, I just don't have the historical knowledge to compile it. I wonder how well known Jackson and Harlan were when they were appointed.
Let's face it, almost anyone appointed, once they get the insulation of their lifetime tenure, is a book with blank pages. If there was no question where they stood, like Bork, well we all know where that would get us. I don't have a problem with Bush wanting to avoid a fight like that.