Judge Roberts Bats A Thousand (I smell a 'RAT, do you?)

It was a battle of the sound bites yesterday at the Senate Supreme Court nomination hearings. The score? Judge John G. Roberts 1, Democrats 0.

Each of the senators got first licks yesterday in a round of ceremonial speeches, but last up was Roberts himself, and he hit the ball out of the park: In his opening statement, Roberts made his role crystal clear by a homey analogy. "Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them. ... Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire." Then he promised, "And I will remember that it's my job to calls balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat."

Good thing, too, the senators must be saying, after watching Roberts go to bat for himself.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., meanwhile, set sail in a sea of lofty rhetoric, noting the chief justice's future responsibilities were "awesome" -- not "in the way my teenage daughter would use the word," but in the biblical sense, like "angels trembling in the presence of God."

Like, wow, man. Just when you were wondering how high Schumer might soar (especially while sailing), suddenly the good senator beached himself in a big, wet mess of metaphor: "(The American people) need to know -- above all -- that if you take stewardship of the high court, you will not steer it so far out of the mainstream that it founders in the shallow waters of extremist ideology. As far as your own views go, however, we have only scratched the surface. In a sense, we have seen maybe 10 percent of you -- just the visible tip of the iceberg, not the 90 percent that is still submerged. And we all know that it is the ice beneath the surface that can sink the ship."

While Schumer was scratching his surface looking for the rest of Roberts, in order to sink him, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., movingly reminded us that She Is A Woman -- A Woman A Lot Older Than You: "As a college student at Stanford, I watched the passing of the plate to collect money so a young woman could go to Tijuana for a back-alley abortion." (Just watched, senator?) Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., digressed into something about "the price of gasoline and the safety of prescription drugs." (Now there's a guy who knows how to use 15 minutes on national TV.) Republican senators mostly used their time to hand Roberts free passes, as in Do Not Answer Question, Judge, Do Pass Go, Collect Supreme Court Seat.

I noticed only one new development: an attempt by left-leaning senators to borrow the right-wing judicial tyranny rhetoric and apply it to decisions by the Supreme Court striking down laws liberals favored. A successful new "framing"? I doubt it. This rhetoric no longer works for conservatives, because the game of politics has become so visibly nasty, partisan and uncivil that few Americans feel very good about the democratic branches of government.

Senators will no doubt continue to speak of themselves in the third person plural, as the voice of We the People. Meanwhile, public approval of the Senate, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), R-S.C., himself pointed out, hovers in the 30s.

Americans want some public spaces that "rise above" partisan politics. They want an institution that they can be proud of, and if Congress won't or can't comply, the Supreme Court will do.

Prediction: This is bad news in the long run for America, and for conservatives who have been on the receiving end of the Supreme Court's gradual expansion of its own institutional power and authority. The good news for conservatives is that this same trend will gently buoy Judge Roberts above the iceberg of Chuck Schumer's animosity and onto the placid sea of a seat on the Supreme Court.

Not necessarily. The "Right to Privacy" is a term which can be applied to several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, collectively. For instance, the government does not have the right to search your home unless they have reasonable grounds to conclude that you have committed a crime.

Furthermore, the ninth amendment maintains that the enumeration of certain rights by the constitution may not be used to deny other rights. In other words, just because the Constitution doesn't say that a right exists doesn't mean that the government has the authority to deny you those rights.

The issue at stake in the abortion debate is not whether there exists a right to privacy -- Judge Roberts correctly stated that all nine Supreme Court judges believed in one -- but whether that right to privacy includes the right to obtain an abortion. This is where the issues of originalism, self-determination and judicial supremacy come into play: The founding fathers defintely did not believe that a right to an abortion was a natural (supra-constitional) right when they passed the ninth amendment, so does that mean that a later generation can assert that abortion rights are a natural right? And if so, how is that decision made, through legislation, jurisprudence, or constitutional amendment? And if the federal government does decide that such a right does exist, does it have the authority to impose that decision on the states?

If he is like Scalia in this 'devout Catholic' part ... great. But I have to agree w/ Crackingham ... if he were such a devout Catholic, why is the MSM so thrilled to death with this guy?

First off, even though Scalia is a devout Catholic he does not follow Catholic teaching on natural law--he is at odds with _Evangelium Vitae_ regarding laws that contradict natural law being unjust and do not compel obedience. I still like Scalia very much, but one must recognize that he had this huge argument with JPII's position on this.

Second, social conservatives need to listen carefully to what Roberts is saying. To undo the huge and vicious mess that the activist liberal SCOTUS has gotten us into we cannot stoop to the same judicial activism or we are just as bad as they are. Instead, the umpire image he used has to be followed rigorously. That may or may not lead to overturning Roe v. Wade--it should lead to that (it was outrageously bad constitutional interpretation) but even if R v. W is overturned some day, it only returns the issue to the state legislatures where it belongs. In the meantime, by his umpire analogy, plenty of ways of chipping away at R. v W. are possible. The judicial activism, legislating from the bench has to be stopped and Roberts is 100 % good for that. But precisely because he respects the role of the judge as umpire and not player, he will not use SCOTUS to create laws that social conservatives might find useful Congress and state legislatures have to do that and if they do, then a Roberts court--a majority of Robertses--would leave stand the legislation the legislatures pass instead of overturning it.

We could then have the Partial Birth Abortion ban instead of the Souterses and Stevenses and various federal judges overturning it. We are winning the battle in the red state legislatures. Our problem is that the elitist activist courts undo what we gain through our elections. Stopping that is all we should be asking for; to go beyond that is to turn around and do what we decry the libs for doing.

In that light, Roberts is _not_ another Souter. If the problem has been liberal activist judges, then Roberts's testimony and his writings show that he is not one of those.

There is one other possibility: perhaps you think he is lying through his teeth when he uses the umpire analogy and, when seated, will become a judicial activist? He has told us he will not. To assume that he will without evidence is grossly unfair--it's the sort of thing a Ted Kennedy or a Joe Biden or a Charles Schumer would do. Don't stoop to their methods. Or do you have evidence that he's a liar,that he says one thing and does another, that he can't be trusted? If so, what is that evidence? Accusing someone of being a deceiver is serious business and you better have evidence for it.

We don't want our agenda forced on the American people by courts any more than we want the Libs' agenda forced on us by courts. What we need are the courts returned to being true courts rather than legislatures and then we have to do the hard slogging work of legislating in the legislatures the sort of social order and morality that we believe in.

It's myopic to start calling Roberts another Souter. There's no evidence of that because he steadfastly refuses to give political answers. Souter has a record of political activist judicial rulings. Roberts has again and again pledged to hear each case strictly according to the law. That's exactly what a judge needs to do and unless you have some evidence that he will become a judicial activist for the left, insisting he's another Souter is stupid. And we have no business wishing for a judicial activist from the Right.

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