With the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court less than two weeks away, his opponents have begun to fret over the fact that the nominee may be too “likeable.”
Even Ralph Neas, head of the left-leaning People for the American Way (PFAW), has announced that “no one should question his likeability.”
In fact, the PFAW website contains a link to a column by E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post which essentially urges Roberts’ opponents to ignore how “nice or smart Roberts may be.” [The column ran in The Denver Post on July 21.]
Now, in the pre-television age, this might prove to be a winning strategy. The nation is deep into the television age, however, and Dionne’s advice is both silly and futile.
When the hearings on Roberts begin next month, the American people will have an opportunity to evaluate him for themselves and to decide whether he is nice or smart.
And while political predictions are always risky, it can safely be said that with Roberts’ record thus far, there will be no repeat of the Robert Bork hearings of 1987. Even before those hearings began, Bork’s opponents had been able to picture him as rigid, dour and disagreeable. The fact that he was bearded may have deepened the perception.
But Roberts is no novice when it comes to television. Just two years ago, he appeared before the same Senate committee for hearings on his present position on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
There is also a video library of some of his speeches and interviews in which he comments on various Supreme Court decisions.
C-SPAN has already aired some of tapes, and what they uniformly show is that Roberts is both nice and smart and also quite articulate when it comes to presenting his point of view.
There is a particularly telling moment in those 2003 hearings when one of the Democratic committee members read back to Roberts a long series of his prior comments about the relationship between the federal government and the states. The reading was clearly intended to expose some contradiction or flaw in Roberts’ legal reasoning. Roberts responded, however, by telling the senator that he always had some trepidation when anyone read back some of his earlier comments. He said he kept listening for an “ungrammatical part” or a comment he might now regret. With a smile, he admitted that he hadn’t heard anything in what the senator read that he would want to take back. He then elaborated on his earlier remarks and the senator had no comeback.
The actual tapes of that confirmation hearing and of the other interviews with Roberts will make it difficult for PFAW and others to successfully distort his record.
For example, PFAW makes much of a comment Roberts made in a 2000 television interview. According to PFAW, Roberts said the current court, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, is “not very conservative.”
What the actual tape of that interview shows is that Roberts was speaking of the term that ended in the summer of 2000. In that interview, he cited three decisions, including one on partial birth abortion and another on the Miranda warning to criminal suspects that arguably went against conservative principles. The third decision, on the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals as members and leaders, upheld conservative principles, he said.
Anyone watching the entire interview would know that Roberts made his comment in response to a specific question. Anyone relying on the PFAW version of events would think Roberts, on his own, had mounted a campaign for a more conservative court.
The Roberts nomination will also greatly be aided by rebroadcasts of tapes made during the confirmation hearings of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer during the Clinton administration. These tapes will make it difficult for Democrats to argue that Roberts should be forced to answer questions previously ducked by Ginsburg and Breyer.
In the end, Roberts’ opponents will be left with just two arrows in their quiver. The first is that Roberts is too charming and therefore too dangerous. The second is that he is too conservative and therefore too dangerous.
Happily, neither of these claims can survive the televised September hearings if Roberts shows up and is just half as effective as he was before the same committee just two years ago.
Al Knight of Fairplay (“mailto:alknight@ mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
