Washington – By 7:15 a.m. Monday, President Bush was meeting in the Oval Office with Judge John Roberts to offer him the nomination for the 17th chief justice of the United States. On most Mondays, that might be a good day’s work, but Bush’s Labor Day was just beginning, and not everything else about it was quite so crisp or well-timed.
On the lawn, Marine One was waiting to take Bush on the first leg of his second trip in three days to inspect the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.
He traded a suit and tie for slacks and a soft-blue sports shirt and flew straight into a thicket of continuing recriminations over his administration’s handling of the disaster and into an awkward dance with the Democratic governor of Louisiana over who would command relief efforts.
“We’re going to show the world once again that not only we will survive, but we’ll be stronger and better for it, when it’s all said and done, that amidst this darkness, there is light,” Bush said at the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La. It was a line that echoed William Faulkner and the Bible, meant to bring hope and comfort to the displaced and the desperate.
But just how well Bush would endure the political challenges posed by the hurricane, much less prevail over them, remained a question Monday. He assured a crowd at a makeshift shelter at the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, “This is a project that not only deals with the immediate; we’re going to have to deal with the long term as well.”
In elevating the nomination of Roberts from associate justice to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Bush acted with typical dispatch and self-assurance to address one of the immediate and unexpected challenges that landed on his desk, perhaps turning it into an opportunity. Roberts, a former Rehnquist law clerk, has already drawn considerable praise, from both parties, for his intellect and acumen. And though some Senate Democrats were quick to suggest that the scrutiny would be greater in considering him for chief justice, his eventual confirmation would not seem to be in any significant doubt.
That means Bush may well have a chief justice, firmly in Rehnquist’s conservative mold, in place by the time the court reconvenes on the first Monday in October, with time to consider – and perhaps calibrate – the more politically delicate task of choosing a successor for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has been the court’s swing vote on contentious issues such as abortion, affirmative action and religion.
It also buys Bush a bit of time to untangle the aftermath of the hurricane.
His challenge is to repair the political damage caused by the government’s slow response to the disaster and to counter the sense that his initial flyover on the way home from vacation and his visit to the region Friday had sounded some sour notes – all without looking political.