Roberts Media Fight
by Vincent Fiore

Everyone says that President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, will be confirmed as the 109th jurist of the highest of court in the land. Or will he?

By leaving behind a scant paper trail over the years of his existence within the legal profession, and an even fainter Washington cocktail-circuit footprint, Judge Roberts gives Senate Democrats a small target . More importantly, the self-installed and self-absorbed “gang of fourteen” can avoid a fight. .

Still, do not expect New York liberal senator Chuck Schumer and rest of the Democratic litmus-seekers to roll over and confirm Roberts without a face-saving fight.

The fact that there is little to fight over--now that conservative ideology, otherwise known as “extraordinary circumstances,” has been knocked down as a reason to hold up a nominee--means little. I mean, isn’t that what the guardians of the filibuster, the “gang of fourteen,” said? Take notes, everyone.

As the world’s most deliberative body, the Senate is also the most self-serving as well. Once the cameras start rolling in the Senate Judiciary chamber, members like Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy will make John Roberts out to be a conservative iconoclast, and it will all be to make a case to the public.

What will Senate Democrats and the media say about Judge Roberts? At present,it is only manufactured nonsense--with most of it coming from that “other” political party that has its own ideological interest in Roberts, the mainstream media.

The outstanding resume of John Roberts has left the media unimpressed, and frustrated. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit court since June, 2003, Roberts worked in the Reagan White House--where he actually helped to prepare Sandra Day O’Connor for her hearings before the Senate Judiciary committee. From 1989 and 1993, he was principal deputy solicitor general for the George H.W. Bush’s White House.

As the government’s second-highest lawyer from 1989 to 1993, and in private practice, Roberts argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court. In fact, that is 39 more cases Roberts has argued than all the lawyers and law school graduates who currently serve on the U.S. Senate, and who now sit in judgment of him.

So, it is only natural that the media and anyone else interested in seeing Roberts fall flat are now engaged in a political scavenger hunt.

The results of the hunt have so far yielded such confirmation-busting items as whether Roberts actually belonged to the Federalist Society or not, (he does not) Roberts’s devotion to Catholicism; and, until now, an area that had previously been off-limits, Roberts’s wife’s affiliation with pro-life groups.

The media have even gone so far as to resurrect the specter of Anita Hill. Ms. Hill was last seen tormenting then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991 with tales of sexual improprieties, while demonstrating to the nation what I would label impromptu insipidness. Hill, who teaches women’s studies at Brandeis University, brandished the race card in comments regarding the nomination of Roberts to the court by Bush by theorizing: “It is not hard to imagine a return to an all-white-male Supreme Court.”

Anything that Anita Hill says these days regarding the nomination of a judge is of little, if any, intrinsic value to the process. But to the media, it is the stuff of controversy. Since the template of derailing the Roberts nomination is derived from the success of torpedoing Robert Bork, and nearly Clarence Thomas as well, it is all grist for the media and Democratic Party smear-mill.

August is traditionally a slow month in Washington. Because it is, the media has, predictably, started turning over rocks to see if John Roberts lies beneath them. What remains to be seen is how effectively Senate Democrats will use the “smoking gun” that the media so doggedly searches for.

When the opposition acts, Republicans had better leap into the fray with hearts and backbones forged of iron. John Roberts deserves a vote on the Senate floor, all the mindless media slings and arrows notwithstanding.

Democrats and their allies within the media lie awake at night, fearing a dawn that brings with it the beginning of the end of their last great hold upon political power, judicial activism. Roberts represents a threat they cannot ignore. Indeed, President Bush may have at least one more pick to the Supreme Court, and as many as three. It is better to define the rules of confirmation with Roberts, and overcome the inevitable mud-raking of Senate Democrats and their accomplices in the mainstream media now.

At the end of the day, Congressional Republicans cannot avoid a fight over John Roberts. But it is a fight that Bush and the GOP must leap into wholeheartedly and joyously.Anything less would doom Roberts, or any other conservative pick, and possibly the GOP itself.

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City.

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