For those who make the argument that he was just being a good lawyer doing his job. If he had volunteered to help out a pro-abortion group in a similar circumstance, would that have been okay too?
John Roberts did not volunteer for this case. He was the lead appellate attorney in a law firm with about 1000 lawyers. It was his job to help those 1000 lawyers with their appellate cases and this was only one of them. As an employee of a law firm he could not pick and chose which lawyers he could help nor the cases, he was bound to help them all - REGARDLESS of his personal ideology on those cases.
And I am not catagorically defending Roberts on this case.
Is it a red flag? Yes.
Does it mean he is unsupportable? No.
This line of argument is ridiculous. Roberts didn't "volunteer" for anything. It's not like he saw that this case was coming up, and ran to the lead attorney, asking to be allowed to help out!
Roberts was asked, as the attorney with the most experience arguing before the Supreme Court, to help a fellow attorney prepare for oral arguments, primarily by serving on a "moot court" in the role of Justice Scalia. All this did what give the attorney an idea of the kinds of questions to expect. From what information is in the article, he did not help prepare the case, write briefs, research precedents, etc.
The lead attorney may consider his help critical, but only in the sense that she knew what kind of questions she would be asked, and was thus prepared to answer them. She still had to come up with answers that were reasonable and credible to the Supremes.
I am glad to see that we have so many people on this forum that are so pure that they have never done anything that they might not agree with in order to help a friend, family member or co-worker! [/sarcasm]