MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Confirmation Abuse
PLEASE NOTE: Just as this essay was being finalized for posting, news broke about Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s death from thyroid cancer on September 3 and President Bush’s nomination of Judge Roberts as chief justice. It’s likely that the Senate will delay the Roberts confirmation hearings for a week or so, but then the hearings will go forward, more or less as planned; however, we can expect Senate Democrats to put up an even more bitter fight, now that Roberts has been nominated to fill the chief justice vacancy. In my essay “The Next Chief Justice,” published in the June issue of The New Individualist, journal of The Objectivist Center, I discuss the significance of President Bush’s appointment of a successor to Rehnquist.
Back from their month-long recess, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee are back in Washington, D.C., ready for the next major political battle in the nation’s capital: the confirmation of Judge John Roberts, President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court – originally picked to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor as associate justice, and now nominated (after Chief Justice Rehnquist’s death) to be the next Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s not unusual that there will be a partisan fight – after all, this is the first Supreme Court vacancy to be filled in over ten years, and it’s also President Bush’s first opportunity to appoint a justice to the high court (and a chief justice, at that) – but, judging from the intense lobbying (and negative ad campaigns) already being waged by left-wing special-interest advocacy groups opposed to Roberts, this battle promises to be especially intense and bitter. It’s also unjust and unjustified. By closely questioning Judge Roberts, not only about his judicial philosophy in general but about his opinions (both past and present) on particular cases and controversies, the members of the Judiciary Committee – and especially the Democrats on the Committee – are abusing their powers. Just as with their use of the filibuster to block President Bush’s nominees to federal appeals courts and to executive-branch posts, Senate Democrats are undermining the Constitution. They are abusing the Senate’s “advise and consent” power, violating one of the fundamental structural principles of the Constitution: separation of powers. To understand why the Senate’s advise and consent power should be construed narrowly, we need to start with first principles. By its very organization, the Constitution separates the legislative, executive, and judicial powers (the three basic functions of government: the powers to make law, enforce laws, and apply laws), putting them into separate hands (the Congress, the president, and the federal judiciary, respectively). Separation of powers is the main rule of the Constitution’s structuring of the national government; so-called “checks and balances” are exceptions to that main rule – instances where powers that would have been allocated to one branch, under pure separation-of-powers theory, are given instead to another branch, to provide a “check” against corruption or abuse of power. The Senate’s advise-and-consent power is one such check and balance: it is found in Article II, the part of the Constitution dealing with executive powers, because it pertains to the appointment power, which is executive by nature. Thus, if the framers of the Constitution had followed a pure theory of separation of powers, the president alone would be given the power to make appointments to all offices, including the justices of the Supreme Court. But the framers instead gave the Senate part of the appointment power, making the president’s appointments subject to the “advise and consent” of the Senate. They did this, primarily, to minimize the danger that the president, swayed perhaps by nepotism or political opportunism, might abuse the power by appointing unqualified persons. As Joseph Story noted in his classic, early-19th-century treatise, Commentaries on the Constitution: “It should never be forgotten, that in a republican government offices are established, and are to be filled, not to gratify private interests and private attachments; not as a means of corrupt influence, or individual profit; not for cringing favourites, or court sycophants . . . .” As an exception to the general rule of separated powers, the Senate’s advise and consent power ought to be construed strictly or narrowly. Keeping in mind its purpose (to help check against corruption or abuse of power), the Senate should veto, or refuse to confirm, presidential appointments only when the nominee is unqualified – to prevent the president from appointing someone who “does not possess due qualifications for office,” as Story put it. American constitutional history generally confirms the limited scope of the Senate’s confirmation power. Occasionally, the Senate has abused its power by refusing to confirm qualified judicial nominees for merely political reasons – from the early history of the Republic (for example, the Senate’s rejection of George Washington’s nominee John Rutledge as Chief Justice in 1795 or its rejection of Andrew Jackson’s nominee Roger Taney as Associate Justice in 1833), to modern times (for example, the Senate’s rejection of two of Richard Nixon’s nominees, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, or its rejection of Ronald Reagan’s nominee Robert Bork in 1987). More often, however, the Senate generally has followed a policy of deferring to the president’s choice of a qualified judicial candidate, even when the majority of Senators were of a different political party and presumably disagreed with the president’s choice. Of the nine justices currently on the Supreme Court, only two of them faced confirmation battles that could be described as difficult – Chief Justice Rehnquist’s confirmations, both as associate justice in 1971 (when he was confirmed 68-26) and as chief justice in 1986 (when he was confirmed 65-33), and Justice Thomas’s confirmation as associate justice in 1991 (when he was confirmed 52-48, the narrowest confirmation margin in the 20th century). (Thomas, as a black conservative, faced bitter opposition from left-liberal special interest groups, many of whom used law professor Anita Hill’s dubious charges of sexual harassment as a cover for their real opposition to Thomas, on jurisprudential grounds.) As summarized by political science professor Ross Baker in a recent USA Today article, the odds overwhelmingly favor the president’s nominess. The Senate has rejected outright only 12 of the 148 nominees it received, with an additional 17 failing to be confirmed for other reasons, such as being withdrawn by the president (“Senate’s Role: Some Advice, Much Consent,” August 29). Cynics may claim that all politicians are hypocrites, but Democrats today generally are far more likely to be guilty of hypocrisy than Republicans. Nowhere is the Democrats’ hypocrisy more evident than in the double standard they’re trying to apply to Judge Roberts’ confirmation hearings. Twelve years ago, during the 1993 confirmation hearings for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Clinton’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D.-Del.), then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, laid out a set of ground rules. Confirmation hearings should not be a “dramatic spectacle,” nor should they become a trial, Biden said. Questions on “judicial methods and philosophy” are fine, but not “questions that focus on specific results or outcomes, the answers to which would risk compromising a nominee’s independence and impartiality.” Biden concluded: “In my view, the public is served best by questions that initiate a dialogue with the nominee, not about how she will decide any specific case that may come before her, but about the spirit and the method she will bring to the task of judging.” Largely thanks to the Senators’ adherence to these ground rules, Ginsburg was easily confirmed for her Supreme Court seat: her confirmation hearings were held July 20-23, 1993, and the Senate confirmed her by a 96-3 vote on August 3, some two months before the start of the Supreme Court’s new term. During her hearings, operating under Biden’s ground rules, Ginsburg had considerable leeway to decide which questions she would answer. At times she simply stated, “I prefer not to address a question like that,” and members of the Committee did not press her. It should be noted that Ginsburg’s nomination was far from being non-controversial. Ginsburg had built her career as a “women’s-rights” attorney who had left-liberal political views that influenced her judicial philosophy, putting her well outside the American “mainstream” on many constitutional issues, including the scope of the right to privacy and application of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Moreover, she was replacing a conservative justice, Justice Byron White, and thus her appointment shifted the so-called “balance” on the Court. Republicans, who were then a minority in the Senate, justifiably could have opposed Ginsburg’s confirmation, on similar partisan grounds now being cited by Democrats for their opposition to Judge Roberts. But in 1993 the Republican minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee accepted Biden’s ground rules; after three and a half days of light questioning in their committee hearings, they sent the Ginsburg nomination to the full Senate, where after a perfunctory debate, she was handily confirmed, as noted above. Similarly, in 1994 after President Clinton nominated his second justice to the Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer, the Senate confirmation process was remarkably speedy. Breyer’s hearings took place July 12-15, and the Senate voted 87-9 on July 29 to confirm him. By accepting Biden’s ground rules in 1993 and 1994, Senate Republicans were acting consistently with the limited role the Constitution gave the Senate in confirming presidential appointments. Although they certainly could have opposed Clinton’s nominees to the Court based on their disagreement with their judicial philosophies (and no doubt some Republicans did, which explains why there were a handful of “no” votes on both the Ginsburg and Breyer confirmations), Republicans in 1993 and 1994 generally deferred to the president’s choice, allowing Clinton to appoint the kind of justices he desired on the Court. Now, however, with Republicans in the majority in the Senate – and, most importantly, with a Republican president – Senator Biden and his fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are singing a different tune. They do not intend to honor what Republicans now call “the Ginsburg standard”; instead, as we will see during the hearings this month, they will ask Roberts inappropriate and wrongful questions. What kinds of questions are inappropriate or wrongful? In general, they fall into seven categories: (1) questions that do not address real-world facts or specific issues (i.e., hypotheticals or broad questions of policy and belief); (2) questions that call for detailed, expert answers on legal subjects on which the nominee is not an expert; (3) questions that cannot be properly answered in the abstract (that is, without the kind of full legal briefing and argument that judges ordinarily receive and use as the basis for their decisions in the cases before them); (4) questions relating to specific cases or controversies likely to come before them as justices of the Supreme Court; (5) questions calling for specific (rather than generalized) answers about judicial management manners (such as whether to allow cameras in the courtroom or the Supreme Court’s authority to discipline lower federal judges); (6) questions calling for specific (rather than generalized) answers about areas of the law that are evolving or otherwise in flux; and (7) questions calling for nominees to discuss their personal feelings or reactions to issues or decisions. These are the seven categories of the “Ginsburg standard”: as attorney Jay Jorgensen shows in his paper distributed by the Federalist Society (“Precedent from the Confirmation Hearings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Conduct of Judicial Nominees”), these were the types of questions that Justice Ginsburg had refused to answer during her confirmation hearings. As Jorgensen observes, her hearings “demonstrate that there are many valid reasons why a judicial nominee may decline to answer the questions posed by individual senators.” Noting that Ginsburg declined to answer, or gave only generalized answers, to a vast number of the questions she was asked” (with many specific examples documented in Jorgensen’s study), but that the Senate nevertheless confirmed her by a vote of 96-3, Jorgensen concludes “the Senate recognized her reasons for caution as valid and appropriate.” There is an eighth category of inappropriate or wrongful questions for judicial candidates, like Judge Roberts, who also served as attorneys in the executive branch of government. Those are questions that erroneously confuse the nominee’s own views or judicial philosophy with the views that the nominee took when functioning as an advocate for the government. Spurred on by left-wing special interest groups eager to find reasons to oppose Roberts, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been pouring over documents released by the White House and the National Archives, from Roberts’ career as a government lawyer in the early 1980s (when he worked as an assistant to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith in 1981-82 and as an attorney in the Reagan White House Counsel’s office in 1982-86) and in the early 1990s (when he worked as top deputy to the U.S. solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush in 1989-93). The Senators’ requests for release of these documents raise many troubling questions about violations of attorney-client confidences and may set a dangerous precedent that might undermine executive-branch independence or freedom of deliberation. Law professor Viet Dinh, a former assistant attorney general, maintained in a USA Today op-ed earlier this summer that there’s a good reason for keeping confidential documents containing candid discussions among the lawyers in the Solicitor General’s office preparing to represent the government in court: “The lawyers in the office constantly decide whether to appeal a case, whether to take sides in a pending case, and how to structure an argument. They can’t make these decisions without freely and honestly weighing the strengths and weaknesses of different legal arguments. The free discussions and candid assessments would end if exposed to the publicity and politics of judicial confirmation” (“Candor Needs Privacy,” July 28). Setting aside these problems, however (“the horse has been let out of the barn,” because the Government has released the documents), there’s an even more important reason why Roberts should not be questioned about views expressed in these documents. As an attorney for the government, he did not have the luxury of following his own views of constitutional questions; his duty was to advance the views of his client – the Reagan or Bush administration – regardless his personal views. Now, of course, Roberts was appointed to those offices in the Reagan White House and Bush Justice Department because he shared many of the “conservative” views of those administrations; nevertheless, because of his duty as an attorney to advance his client’s interests, we must be careful not to confuse his personal views with the views he expressed in memos, briefs, or other documents written in his role as a government attorney. Put another way, it would be wrong to assume that positions he took or arguments he advanced in his role as government attorney reflect his own personal views, either on political matters or matters of constitutional law and interpretation. That’s especially true with regard to documents in which Roberts is throwing out ideas, perhaps even as a kind of “devil’s advocate,” in the free-wheeling, presumptively confidential discussions among government attorneys that Professor Dinh wrote about. Left-wing special-interest groups have been scouring those documents from Judge Roberts’ earlier career, anxious to find excuses to oppose his confirmation – and they have been testing various arguments, in their press releases to the news media and (no doubt) in confidential memos to their friends among the Democrats (both Senators and staffers) on the Judiciary Committee. Thus, by following the news articles leaked by “confidential sources” to the news media throughout the summer, it’s possible to predict exactly which issues the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee will raise at the Roberts confirmation hearings – as well as which kinds of improper questions they will try to get Judge Roberts to answer. For example, some radical feminists are pressing the Senators to question Roberts about a memo he wrote while a lawyer in the Reagan White House in the early 1980s in which he seemed dismissive about women’s claims of discrimination, referring to the “purported” gender gap and “perceived problem” of women’s wages. What Roberts was writing about was so-called “comparable worth,” a scheme that would have the government set wages for jobs based on their supposed “intrinsic worth” rather than what the market set – which Roberts opposed, calling the scheme (quite rightly) “nothing less than central planning of the economy by judges.” (Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in an August 24 Wall Street Journal op-ed pointed out that comparable worth was repudiated by policy makers and courts 20 years ago. She notes that Justice Anthony Kennedy, then a judge on the Ninth Circuit, “helped deliver the death-blow to comparable worth,” when he wrote the opinion for a unanimous court dismissing a claim brought by female public employees in Washington state, noting “The state did not create the market disparity and has not been shown to have been motivated by impermissible sex-based considerations in setting salaries.” As Chavez notes, Kennedy’s comments didn’t bar him from the Supreme Court two years later, “nor should Roberts’ be held against him by feminists sore that they lost their battle for comparable worth decades ago.”) Of all these red-herring issues, one is especially important to the left-liberal special-interest groups and their campaign against Roberts – the issue that makes leftist activists foam at the mouth in their fanaticism (just as it also makes their social-conservative opponents, the fanatics at the other extreme of the debate, also equally irrational) – and that issue is: Abortion. Although Roberts testified during his 2003 Senate confirmation hearings that he regards Roe v. Wade as “binding precedent,” he had argued in a brief written for the first Bush administration in 1991 that “Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled.” (Again, it should be emphasized that what he wrote in a brief for the administration while serving as a government lawyer did not reflect his own personal views but the views of the administration. Even if this were his own view, however, what’s so wrong about criticizing Roe? Justice Blackmun’s opinion for the Court in that 1973 case may be justly criticized for being an example of left-liberal judicial activism: even for supporters of the unenumerated constitutional right to privacy, the way Blackmun devised a trimester scheme to balance the rights of a pregnant woman against the rights of her unborn child seems to be exactly the kind of activism – with the Court deciding policy questions that, arguably, the Tenth Amendment reserves to state legislatures – that many conservatives justifiably decry.) Abortion-rights activists who are wedded to defense of Roe as a critical litmus test have taken one-issue constitutional politics to an unreasonable extreme. Indeed, one extreme group, NARAL Pro-Choice America, briefly aired this summer a widely criticized TV ad that essentially accused Roberts of sympathizing with abortion clinic bombers – an ad that grossly distorted Roberts’ record. (Again in 1991, while deputy U.S. solicitor general under the first President Bush, Roberts argued that anti-abortion protesters who blocked access to abortion clinics could not be prosecuted under a century-old civil rights law (the 1871 anti-Ku Klux Klan law), a perfectly valid interpretation of the statute that the Court adopted by a 6-3 vote. Roberts’ interpretation of the law in that case cannot justly be cited as evidence of sympathy for the tactics of anti-abortion protestors; indeed, as assistant White House counsel in 1986, he drafted a letter to a member of Congress who had concerns that President Reagan might pardon those convicted of clinic bombings, noting that “No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals,” and adding that “neither the cause … nor the target of their violence will mitigate the seriousness of their offense against our laws.”) Make no mistake about it: despite their rhetoric claiming to be acting on behalf of Americans’ constitutional “rights,” the Senate Democrats are motivated purely by partisan politics of the nastiest sort. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee – Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts, Joe Biden of Delaware, Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Dianne Feinstein of California, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin – are among the most rabidly partisan, left-wing members of the Senate. Most of them depend, for their re-election, on the support (financial and otherwise) of the same leftist advocacy groups that are opposing Roberts – groups like NARAL and People for the American Way, which see a jurisprudential conservative like Roberts as an obstacle to their nefarious designs. And what are those designs? Conservatives are generally quite right in maintaining that leftists are trying to pack the federal judiciary with left-liberal activist judges who’ll abuse their power as judges to help advance their public-policy agenda. How do liberal activist judges do this? They do it in two ways. First, by failing to enforce limits the Constitution places on the powers of Congress (through both Commerce Clause powers and the so-called “spending power”), they essentially give the national government carte blanche to control individual citizens’ lives, especially in economic matters. Second, by selectively protecting individual rights (enforcing only those provisions of the Bill of Rights they regard as important or “fundamental”), they enable government at all levels – not only the national government, but the states and local government, too – to run roughshod over individual rights that left-liberals disregard (property rights and economic liberty, or the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms,” for example). To see how left-liberal judicial activism threatens individual freedom, consider just two of the key decisions from the Supreme Court’s recent 2004-05 term: the Court’s decision in the medical marijuana case, Raich v. Gonzales, and the Court’s decision in Connecticut eminent domain case, Kelo v. City of New London. In both these cases. the left-liberal justices on the Supreme Court, joined by one or two of the so-called “conservative” justices (Kennedy and/or Scalia), expanded government’s ability to control people’s lives – in one case, by allowing Congress to criminalize possession even of marijuana grown in people’s own homes for their personal medicinal use; and in the other case, by allowing local governments to seize people’s homes through eminent domain powers in order to make room for commercial development. (For more on the Court’s erroneous decisions in these two cases, see my previous entry “More Supreme Nonsense,” June 24.) Left-liberal politicians like Teddy Kennedy and leftist special-interest advocacy groups have been whining that if another conservative justice is confirmed to the Supreme Court, it will be the end of “women’s rights,” “workers’ rights,” “gay rights,” “rights for the disabled,” “environmental rights,” et cetera. These frenzied cries are based on two grossly erroneous assumptions: they mischaracterize both the proper role of the judiciary and the essential nature of rights, properly understood. Once we identify these two erroneous assumptions, we can see exactly why left-wing activists are so incensed at the appointment of a conservative to the Court. First – contrary to the assumption that lurks behind Senator Kennedy’s frequently-asked question “Whose side is he on?”– responsible judges do not take sides; they impartially and objectively apply the law to the facts of the particular cases and controversies that come before them. Sure, there are always winners and losers in litigation – one side to the controversy wins its arguments before the court, while the other side loses – but in deciding cases, judges have an obligation to follow the law, impartially and objectively, rather than their own personal preferences for the outcome of the decision. When judges cease to follow neutral, objective legal principles and instead follow their own subjective biases, they are guilty of that abuse of the judicial power that is commonly called “judicial activism.” Jurisprudential conservatives, like Judge Roberts (or at least he appears to be), are especially conscious of the evils of judicial activism and thus try scrupulously to avoid it in their judicial decision-making. Second, the leftists’ frequent appeal to various special-interest rights distorts the essential nature of rights, properly understood. The only “rights” that people legitimately have, in our constitutional system, are rights they hold as individuals: all the legitimate rights found in the Constitution – each of them being an aspect of the fundamental, natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – pertain equally to all individuals. Thus, there is really no such thing as “women’s rights,” “workers’ rights,” “gay rights,” “rights for the disabled,” or “environmental rights”: each of these special-interest “rights” are not rights, properly speaking, but rather claims upon use of the coercive powers of government to benefit some individuals at the expense of others. Rather than being genuine rights, they each necessitate the abuse of governmental powers to invade the genuine rights of some persons in order to “benefit” others. Let’s translate leftist-speak into what each of these pseudo-“rights” really means. “Women’s rights” means, among other things, that a pregnant woman’s freedom to terminate a pregnancy should trump all other individuals’ legitimate rights – and particularly, an unborn child’s fundamental right to life – as well as such fundamental American constitutional principles as federalism and separation of powers. “Worker’s rights” means, among other things, that the coercive power of government should be used to prop up the political power of labor unions, to force employers to accede to employee demands not fairly advanced at the bargaining table. “Gay rights,” as advocated by leftists, means that the government should criminalize homophobia. “Rights for the disabled” means, among other things, that government should dictate not only employment practices but also the designs of buildings and walkways – and that’s just to help assure “equal access” for one category of “disabled” persons, those whose physical disabilities require them to use wheelchairs. When one takes into account the expansive definition of “disabled” that some activists advocate – not mere physical disability, but medical including mental (such “disabilities” as hyperactive disorder or attention-deficit disorder), “rights for the disabled” can easily become the nightmare scenario envisioned by Kurt Vonegut in his short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which government assumes totalitarian powers in pursuit of the vain quest of “equalizing” opportunity for all, by handicapping the able. And finally, “environmental rights,” among other things, means expansive interpretation of federal laws such as wetlands protection laws and the Endangered Species Act which deprive property owners of their rights and which sacrifice economic development at the altar of environmental radicalism. Because the “environment,” as an abstract entity, has no rights, it means that those who profess to act on its behalf – the radical environmentalists – can use the coercive power of government, often backed up by phony pseudo-science theories, to destroy the legitimate rights (property rights and economic freedom rights) of others. All these pseudo-“rights” really mean using the power of government to advance the demands asserted by some special-interest groups in society against the rights – the true, legitimate legal/constitutional rights – of other Americans.
By all accounts – and measured objectively, not under the jaundiced eye of partisan politics – John Roberts is an exceptionally able candidate for Supreme Court chief justice. He is one of the best experienced candidates in the history of the Court, having clerked for then-Associate Justice Rehnquist in 1980-81 and then, in his career as a government lawyer and private lawyer, argued 39 cases before the Court. When he was nominated to the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia, he received support from both sides of the traditional political spectrum. Nearly 150 members of the D.C. bar (including some former Clinton administration officials) signed a letter urging his confirmation, which called him “one of the very best and most highly respected appellate lawyers in the nation” as well as “a wonderful professional colleague both because of his enormous skills and because of his unquestioned integrity and fair-mindedness.” Even the left-wing American Bar Association has rated Judge Roberts “well qualified,” the highest rating the ABA can give to a federal judicial candidate. Although he has shunned an ideological label – denying that he has “an all-encompassing philosophy”-- Roberts seems to be a conservative, which means that he generally holds a political philosophy shared with about half the American people. (Thus, he is hardly outside the “mainstream.”) More to the point, his jurisprudence, or judicial philosophy, is conservative, which means that he respects the text of the Constitution, which he sees (properly) as a document designed basically to limit the powers of government. It also means that he adheres to a philosophy of judicial restraint, making him loath to substitute his policy preferences for those of the legislature. As a conservative, Roberts is far from perfect: under my contextualist theory of constitutional interpretation, he shares with other judicial conservatives the common problems of failing to protect all individual rights (whether or not they are enumerated in the Constitution) as fully as he should. But in general conservatives do not err in their interpretation of the Constitution any more than left-liberals do. (As I have argued, both sides in the modern debate over constitutional questions – both conservatives and left-liberals – fail to fully understand the importance of context and thus get it wrong.) And in many respects, conservatives’ errors are far less dangerous to the rights of individuals than left-liberals’ errors are. (For more on this, see my essays in The New Individualist, the journal of The Objectivist Center: “The Next Chief Justice,” June 2005, and “Interpreting the Constitution Contextually,” October 2003.) Senators who take seriously their oaths to preserve and protect the Constitution – and who respect all the legitimate constitutional rights of all the American people (not just the pseudo-rights asserted by the most vocal special-interest groups) – must vote to confirm Judge Roberts as the next chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Any Senator who votes “No” on Roberts’ confirmation – whether a Democrat or a so-called “moderate” Republican (which really means a partially leftist Republican) – is sacrificing this greater duty to the American people, in order to pander to left-wing special interests. Any Senator who does this is abusing the “advise and consent” power that the framers of the Constitution entrusted to the Senate. That’s a far greater abuse of power than anything Judge Roberts’ enemies have accused him of.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, September 5, 2005 | Copyright David N. Mayer |
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