September 15, 2005
The most cynical essay about Roberts ... and Ted Kennedy's counterpoint to that
by Liza Sabater
Cynicism, Capitol Hill style, brough to you by Newsday.com: Roberts, enmeshed :
When Roberts sits down in front of the U.S. Senate this week, he won't exactly be in enemy territory. No U.S. senator wants to gratuitously offend Hogan & Hartson. After all, what happens to U.S. senators and representatives when they retire or are defeated? In many cases, they become partners at ... you guessed it, Hogan & Hartson. The roster of the firm includes numerous former congressmen, including onetime Minority Leader Robert Michel (R-Ill.). One of their biggest-grossing partners in the health care field, Florida's Paul G. Rogers, a Democrat, was chairman of a powerful House subcommittee before going into private practice. Sen. John Warner of Virginia, a Republican who will vote on Roberts' nomination, went the other way. He was a Hogan lawyer before joining the Senate.After famed antiwar senator William Fulbright lost his seat, he didn't go back to Arkansas; he went to Hogan & Hartson. When Fulbright retired in 1994, Roberts was his law partner.
And if John Roberts is well connected in both the legal, social and religious worlds, don't expect the press to give him a particularly hard time either.
It was surprising to some outside Washington when the press raised so little ruckus about Bush's nominee for solicitor general, Ted Olson. Olson, after all, had a long record of defending ultraconservative positions, such as opposing the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. He was the president's lawyer in Bush v. Gore and served in the Reagan administration.
Inside the Beltway, the kid-glove treatment of Olson was no surprise. For nearly 20 years, Ted Olson had been the host of an important annual preterm briefing on Supreme Court cases. With no sign of fatigue, Olson and a colleague pored through each expected Supreme Court case for that term. Participants were a veritable who's who of the Supreme Court reporting world: Nina Totenberg of NPR; Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times; Tony Mauro of Legal Times, formerly of USA Today; Tim O'Brien of ABC News.
Olson's value as a source on the hows and whys of Supreme Court decisions far outweighs any urge on the reporters' part to be critical of him, even though many outside the Beltway simplistically think there is a "liberal" bias in the press. The real bias in the Washington press is to protect those who help you, regardless of ideology. For many years Olson was joined in delivering the briefing by none other than John G. Roberts.
Recently, the leader of one of the most impassioned liberal special interest groups told me that she ran into a usually sympathetic television and radio reporter. "You have to do something about John Roberts," she pleaded. "He's horrible." The journalist replied, "I'm not going to say anything about John Roberts. He's been returning my calls for years."
Here's the zinger:
If the questions from Democrats seem tough, know that most of them are going through the motions of appeasing left-leaning interest groups who do a lot of fundraising for candidates. John G. Roberts ultimately is part of the club. For the true Washington insider, it's clear sailing, all the way.
I would really like to believe that Ted Kennedy's conference call with the top liberal bloggers in the nation was more than a Wag the Dog
Kennedy was pointed about why Roberts needed to be rejected : The Bush administration has refused to release documents dealing with constitutional law that would shed light on how Roberts handled cases involving constitutional law. Roberts as a judge did not handle a lot of decisions but as White House counsel, he worked on more than 1000 of which 300 he was directly involved and of which 16 had to do with constitutional law. "The administration has chosen not to give all his records", he said. "They will give us nothing."
The White House is citing confidentiality privileges --but we all know that after the Clinton impeachment trials, confidentiality privileges were proven to not extend to the White House. Now why has nobody sued the government and called for an injuction on the hearings until the documents are released ... well, once you read this Newsday article you will know.
What was most troubling about this conference call was Kennedy's Cassandra-like pronoucements : "I voted against the war and I was proven right". He said he knows John Roberts has to be stopped.
I'd be hard press to believe these are the protests of a posseur.
(Mental note : John Roberts smirks like the Shrub.)
Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, John Roberts, SCOTUS, Supreme Court
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