How did John Roberts, the President’s pick to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the Supreme Court, go from being a consensus shoo-in — a mild-mannered and impeccably credentialed appointment — to being the target of increasingly hostile rhetoric and reporting?
Most likely, it’s because some have been itching for a battle over the U.S. Supreme Court nomination for so long that they are pulling the trigger out of sheer reflex. Unfortunately, Roberts’ opponents, more often than not, have found themselves shooting blanks — or even worse, shooting themselves in the foot.
It seems like just a few short weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that Roberts was too low-key to inspire much heated criticism and that he would sail through the nomination process. In retrospect, no one should be surprised how much the battle has heated up. One only need do a cursory check of headlines from 1991 to see that many of the same things were said about Clarence Thomas, and only later did his confirmation hearings turn into the free-for-all they became.
Last week, the left-wing pro-choice group NARAL ran an ad that accused Roberts of supporting abortion clinic bombers — a decidedly false ad that has since been debunked and pulled. Still, it showed the length some are willing to go to in picking a fight over who should be on the nation’s highest court.
Then, in response to several articles speculating that Roberts would face nothing but smooth sailing, Sen. Ted Kennedy decided to blow up a storm on the Washington Post’s editorial page, calling for the release of many documents from Roberts’ past — ones that he has no authority to demand and that have not been sought in previous nomination processes — and questioning whether Roberts is in the “judicial mainstream.”
The last time I checked, Kennedy is not a part of and does not get to define what is “mainstream.” In fact, in deference to Mary Jo Kopechne, perhaps he should refrain from using the word “stream” at all.
Now, in perhaps the most blatant display of media bias in recent memory, that same Washington Post leads with the scare headline “Roberts Resisted Women’s Rights,” while USA Today goes for the misnomer “Roberts scoffed at equal pay theory.” What they don’t tell you, amidst a flurry of breathless-sounding protestations, is that the only practice Roberts objected to, and advised the Reagan administration against, was the staggeringly Marxist theory of “comparable worth.” Far from being an “equal pay” theory — which would assert that men and women should be paid the same for doing the same job — this “comparable worth” theory means that the government would get to decide what jobs are worth and dictate to employers what each job should pay. Under this practice, if the government deemed that a secretary should make as much as a doctor, then so be it. Hardly the kind of practice on which sound economies are built.
As is if that weren’t enough, the Washington Post insists that Roberts disparaged women with a remark questioning “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.” Anyone who had read his remark, and who possessed a sense of humor, would know that Roberts’ crack was at the expense of lawyers — of which he was one — and not women. Even the New York Times got that joke.
In the end, Roberts should welcome these groups taking such poorly-aimed shots at him. After all, the more shrill and unfounded attacks he receives from the further reaches of the left, the more appealing his wry sense of humor, even-handed judicial philosophy and smooth temperament will seem. Far from derailing Roberts’ nomination, his attackers could find, I can only hope, that they’ve given him a non-stop ticket.
Write to Tim at
redbaron.strikesagain@gmail.com
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