Joseph Farah has written an interesting commentary on WorldNetDaily.com today about how we have been manipulated into believing in the integrity of John Roberts, Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court.
I don't know about you, but I am growing weary of this whole process, and it is sometimes difficult for an outsider to know just who to believe. While virtually all the pro-life leaders have only praise for Roberts, the vast majority of prominent conservative observers have been very vocal about why Roberts is a poor choice.
Read more at Choose Life.
"Nearly every prominent conservative observer?" Uh, aside from Ann Coulter and this dude (who I've never heard of), who are you talking about?
Bush has passed more pro-life legislation than any president of the modern era. This Farah fellow considers him to be a great disappointment as a president. He's obviously not going to be happy with anyone. Robert's wife helps head up Feminists for Life. You won't get anyone better than that.
To the extent that this sort of thing makes it more likely that Roberts will be easily confirmed, I don't mind this sort of talk. To the extent that it makes those who join in it look like nutters, you probably should.
I never pay attention to World Net Daily, simply because they so often misrepresent their opponents, distort facts, and use such harsh language often against innocent things. In this case, I can think of a perfectly reasonable and very conservative explanation for Roberts' support for privacy rights. He's a conservative. He believes in small government. He thinks immoral behavior by two people in their own home should not be regulated by the government unless it's nonconsensual (or perhaps harmful enough that we should protect people from themselves, but this is optional for the view I have in mind). I have seen quite a number of people who oppose gay rights on some issues endorse this view with regard to gay sodomy. It may be that Roberts is right on board with that, and if so it wouldn't reflect that he's weak on abortion or any other issue. Smart people take nuanced positions, and therefore they don't toe the party line of more simplistic worldviews that don't always involve careful thought about how things fit together.
I also wouldn't discount that he'd step in to help a colleague on a case that he might not agree with as a return for a favor or to try to get more support from his partners for his own idiosyncratic cases that others might not as easily want to help him with. Unless you think there's some absolute moral requirement that we have to have laws against any immoral activity that might occur in the bedroom (which would be insane; we couldn't list all of them), then there's shouldn't need to be a moral objection to his helping them.
It's quite clear that John Roberts is far more conservative than his record proves. He's no Souter. Those who want to treat him as one, if they had their way, would give us Edith Clement instead, who we know is more moderate. Bush has served the pro-life cause with this nominess, as he has with virtually every decision he has made that has a bearing on pro-life issues. He's made the right calls on which things to pursue, and the pro-life cause has been furthered more because he isn't willing to stand behind things that don't have enough support to achieve. That's how someone willing to accomplish something does it. Those who want to fail will follow the advice of World Net Daily authors.
Anyone who has read my blog with any regularity knows that I have been on board with the Roberts nomination from the very first day. He SEEMS to be pro-life, and he SEEMS to be a strict constitutionalist, but without a paper trail it is nearly impossible to determine where he stands on anything.
For those of you whose allegiance is to President Bush, consider these facts: his appointment to Attorney General, pro-choice; his appointment to Secretary of State, pro-choice. Your devotion may be to the president, but my devotion is to a cause, namely overturning Roe v. Wade in my lifetime.
And for those of you who thought my post was about gay rights, YOU MISSED THE POINT. My bottom line is this: is John Roberts a strict constitutionalist or is he an activist? To pretend to know the answer with such little information as we have seems irresponsible.
John Ashcroft is about as pro-life as you get, and we have no indication whatsoever about Gonzales. The only thing we know about him is that he considered it his duty as a judge to decide whether a girl was morally mature enough to understand the issues involved in matters like abortion, and that says nothing at all about whether he would have recommended to her to have the abortion or whether he agreed with the law that allowed judges to take away from parents the right to make such decisions.
John Roberts is not a strict constructionist. He has made that clear. He thinks all such views are reductionistic. He doesn't think there are absolutist principles that you can just apply to every case no matter what else is involved with the case, and he thinks strict constructionists either have to do that or not be true to their strict constructionist principles. Of course, very few people are really strict constructionists in that sense, because he's right. You can't really be a strict constructionist in that way on every case. Scalia and Thomas certainly aren't, and they're the closest well-known figures who claim to be in that general area (Scalia isn't a strict constructionist but an originalist, and I don't know what name Thomas attaches to his view).