Posted on 07/30/2005 11:58:45 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
They are not exactly father and son, but they share a singular bond in an elite business: 25 years ago this summer, almost exactly half his lifetime ago, John G. Roberts went to work for William H. Rehnquist, and now he stands poised to become the first Supreme Court clerk in American history to sit on the bench alongside the justice he served.
His 13 months in the chambers of Justice Rehnquist spanned the period of the 1980 election and the dawn of the Reagan revolution in Washington. It was a heady time of relentless work, long walks on Capitol Hill discussing cases informally with the justice and sharp-elbowed basketball games in the Supreme Court gym, wryly referred to as the "highest court in the land."
It was a time when the Supreme Court was far different, more liberal, and that made John Roberts stand out among the other clerks.
"John's conservatism was in fact a sign of intellectual courage, coming out of Harvard and being surrounded by law clerks from mainly liberal, East Coast, Ivy institutions," said John A. Siliciano, a law professor at Cornell who clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the same time.
His was "a very solid, rigorous, coherent view of very important social questions," Professor Siliciano said, "about the relations between courts and legislatures, about the relationship between the federal government and the state, between the public sphere and the private."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Amazing!
That must mean they believe Roberts is a stealth candidate ala Souter. Ann Coulter may be right!!
(/tinfoil hat)
That won't stop idiots like Schumer from breathlessly quoting it in horror. I can imagine him spewing something such as: "Judge Roberts is clearly unfit to sit on the bench - the last thing that this country needs is someone with a sardonic wit making the laws". Ted Kennedy would say something stupid like: "John Roberts' America is a land in which sardonic wit would be used to force women into back-alley abortions..." etc etc.
bump
Or perhaps after continued layoffs at the NYT, it's actually the NYT who are stealthy in their reporting to bolster circulation.
Even more "tin foil".
Isn't TODD S. PURDUM Mr. Dee Dee Meyers?
LOL! OTOH, Senator Kennedy, I would trust Judge Roberts, and very few others, to drive my daughter home!
Ted Kennedy would say something stupid like: "John Roberts' America is a land in which sardonic wit would be used to force women into back-alley abortions..." etc etc.
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LOL ... good one.
The fact that Rehnquist chose him to be his clerk is the single most telling thing, to me.
What strikes me about the article is that it actually gives almost no solid information from which one can conclude he is either a constitutional originalist or not. It would be nice to see at least one anecdote about when he and a liberal clerk got into a serious discussion and he took the originalist position; none appears in this apparently well researched article. Hence, my qualms about him are not stilled and I'm moving more and more to the Coulter camp.
These guys may lose their positions @ the NYT...square blocks in round holes.
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