OK, here's what Sen. Reid said of Roberts:
One thing [Reid] asked [Roberts] was how he felt about Supreme Court precedents -- in particular, on what grounds they might be overturned. "Precedent is so important to me in the law," Reid told him.
Roberts, Reid recalled, said, "'Oh, on the Supreme Court you can change precedent only if there's this and this,' and he was rattling them off. I hope I didn't act surprised, but I'd never heard anything like that before." Roberts, in Reid's view, left no doubt that he would be very reluctant to overturn precedents. To do so, Roberts had said, the Court would first have to consider a series of objective criteria, two of which stood out: whether a precedent fostered stability in the nation; and the extent to which society had come to rely on an earlier ruling, even a dubious one. "I thought it would be more of a weaselly answer than that, but he said you have to meet all these standards before you can change a precedent," Reid said.
Maybe the Democratic "resistance" is a feint...