Washington – President Bush moved boldly to shift the Supreme Court to the right Tuesday night by selecting U.S. Appeals Court Judge John G. Roberts to succeed Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
But in choosing a jurist with establishment credentials and bipartisan allies, Bush was also looking for a nominee who could still win confirmation with some Democratic votes.
Bush appeared to have the court’s future and the confirmation process in mind as he made his decision this week. All day the name of appellate Judge Edith Brown Clement floated through Washington as the president’s apparent choice, but many on the right consider her conservative credentials far more suspect than Roberts’. By picking Roberts, Bush displayed his determination to put a more conservative stamp on the court.
At the same time, the president passed over a number of highly conservative judges whose nominations would have been seen as far more polarizing than Roberts’. Given that this was the first but probably not the last Supreme Court vacancy he will be asked to fill, Bush sought a less confrontational approach with the Senate than he has adopted with his lower court nominations.
Roberts faces a potentially tough confirmation battle in any case, given the significance of O’Connor as the swing vote in many of the court’s most important cases.
There was no more important seat on the court than O’Connor’s, and outside groups on the left and right began drawing lines Tuesday night even before Bush appeared in the East Room with Roberts and his family. They have been ready for months for a noisy and lengthy argument over the future of the court.
But Senate Democrats reacted much more cautiously, saying only that there were many questions they wanted Roberts to answer during his confirmation hearings. Privately they were being urged to keep their powder dry until a fuller vetting of Roberts’ record both as a judge and a lawyer is completed later this summer.
That initial reaction may have been as much tactical as substantive, given the fact that Senate Democratic leaders had urged their colleagues not to overreact no matter who Bush nominated. Later, they plan to press for access to records relating to Roberts’ service in the Reagan administration and, if denied, will turn up the heat.
For the White House, Roberts appears to be the ultimate confirmable conservative. As a replacement for O’Connor, a centrist who voted to uphold abortion rights and affirmative action, he would probably move the court’s overall balance to the right. But he would do so without some of the verbal pyrotechnics that have characterized the opinions of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
As a lifelong Republican, Federalist Society member and veteran of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, the 50- year-old has established his credentials for the right. But his rhetoric is cool, earning him many friends and few outspoken enemies. His abilities are widely acknowledged to be excellent. And he has assembled a paper record that seems to offer no undeniable proof of personal views to be attacked as extreme.
