Roberts Nomination: Strategery at Work

The first reactions to the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court indicate
that the Bush Administration has thought long and hard about court nominations. Roberts is young, brilliant, boringly
straight arrow, and has only been on the bench for a year and a half. Thus
Charles Hurt forecasts an
easy nomination process, and
John Podhoretz evaluates him as suitably boring.
As the nomination process starts let us conduct a quick tour d’horizon.

Grand Strategy We want liberals to abandon their living constitution doctrine. They have
developed this doctrine over the last half century because they have come to rely on the Supreme Court to rule
in favor of their educated elite agenda. We want to change their minds. We want them to
see the constitution as a bulwark against the evil right-wing agenda. They will start to change their
minds when a conservative court starts goring their oxen. Putting a conservative on the court hastens
the day when they will opportunistically discover the virtues of a “dead” constitution over
a living one.

Strategy We want a court that has a smaller appetite for power, that does not seek, like
the Massachusetts High Court, to be out there on the cutting edge of societal evolution. In that sense
Roberts appears to be a good choice. He appears to be a work horse, not a show horse.

Tactics In the past few years as Microsoft has begun to focus above all on the issue of
security they have come to appreciate, like the military, the advantage of a small target. A small target
is more difficult to destroy. So they have begun to work to make Windows smaller, with fewer entrances and
exits. The Bushies have applied this understanding in the Roberts nomination. Roberts has spent most of his life litigating, so
he doesn’t have a long paper trail. Also, he appears to be a mild-mannered man without enemies. Writes
Podhoretz:

Roberts has, by all accounts, an astonishingly mild demeanor. He’s a churchgoing
father of adopted children, personally well-liked on all sides of the political spectrum —
evidently because he hasn’t given anybody a reason to dislike him personally.

Notice too that if this mild-mannered man gets confirmed without a big fight it cools down the whole
judicial nomination furnace. It will be harder for the liberal activists to blow their supporters up
into white heat for the next nomination.

No doubt Ralph Neas of the (liberal) People for the American Way and Nan Aron of the (liberal)
Alliance for Justice will deploy every argument they can against Roberts. But, as of today, it
looks like they have an uphill fight ahead of them.