Roger Scruton is great! He suffered a lot for his views, was dumped by publishers and universities, but still kept on writing brilliant books.
He also wrote a great non-philosophical, non-political book called I Drink Therefore I Am. It’s about wine and his memories of different wines, different places he drank them, different events in his life. A very good read!
That said, I had read that Roberts had been interviewed and said that he would not preside because this was not a trial but a political proceeding. He’s absolutely right, of course, it’s not matter for trial and is really just an intra-Senate political proceeding of one party against another. The Chief Justice is not only not needed for this, it would probably be unconstitutional for him to preside.
If you sit and think about....just starting this case with a out-of-office President, it was going to fail Constitutionally.
With Roberts running this...the case would have to come to the Supreme Court. Since he participated....he couldn’t handle the case would be out of this totally.
Adding to it...various errors on his part would have gotten Judge Thomas’s attention and he would have written a 50-page negative review of Robert’s handling of the case. Thomas would have been laughing for weeks over the poor handling.
So Roberts saw the landscape...knew it was a zero-value case and avoided the mess.