I hope that lots of FReepers get the opportunity to read it.
From the editorial:
Mr. Roberts also took on Theodore Olson, a top Justice official at the time. Mr. Roberts wanted to support a bill championed by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction in cases involving school prayer, school desegregation and abortion.
Mr. Olson thought the Thurmond bill might be unconstitutional because it eliminated a way to remedy school segregation.
But Mr. Roberts argued that the Thurmond bill actually would help desegregate schools. In a bit of sophistry that turned the Constitution's promise of equality upside down, he claimed that "busing promotes segregation rather than remedying it, by precipitating white flight."
This is only one issue, of course, and an old opinion by the future Justice, but of importance in his willingness to state the obvious, which so many either ignore or try to distort. Of course busing precipitated white flight. And, though busing has, in theory at least, been eliminated by the courts, it persists in the form of careful balancing of "high poverty" or "low achieving" students throughout urban school systems, and white flight has, if anything, been accelerated.
Or, perhaps we should call it "smart flight," because middle and upper black families, too, are beginning to move to the burbs. And the cataclysmic failure of urban school systems, including a "share the misery" program guaranteed to finish off whatever high-quality urban schools may have existed, is a big reason.
Judge Roberts (even at an early age, before he was a judge) was not afraid to ignore political correctness, and state the painful truth. I am increasingly impressed with the President's choice.
"The linked article is excellent -- not, of course, in the sense that I agree with the editorial opinion, but rather that my enthusiasm for the nominee is reinforced by the very things that the Post-Dispatch views with alarm."
That's exactly what happened to me. The more I was reading it, the more I thought, "hey, this guy is really good!"
I especially liked his note, "Real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow (to the media and academics)." I truly hope he still feels that way.
Amen