Rounding Up Roberts

Rounding Up Roberts

Still reading up. Lots of commentary on the timing to push Rove off page one, but that's too obvious to even grouch about. Greatest hits of the blogosphere this AM:

Amanda Marcotte:

We know that Justice Roberts will get voted in. But that in no way means that he should go without a fight. I'm an optimist. I say we have a basketful of lemons, let's make lemonade. This is leverage to expose the fact that the Republicans, including the President, are a bunch of far-right wingnuts who are beholden to Bible-thumpers who are single-handedly determined to ruin the lives of average Americans by taking away, first and foremost, the right to privacy that ensures that we can live as we choose...

Bush the First appointed a misogynistic wingnut named Clarence Thomas, helping drive female voters into the arms on one Bill Clinton. It's worked before. Let's work it, folks.

MyDD offers a risky analysis:

Roberts is a DC partisan political insider hack operative Republican. He's basically a politician that, because he lives in DC, cannot run for office anywhere, so he's become a political Judge instead, fighting to institutionalize the Republican Party within the Federal branch of the government. There's no doubt about it; but that also makes him likely to be confirmed.

Being a political operative, Roberts might just calculate that having Roe vs Wade around to hoodwink anti-abortionists into voting Republican is better than overturning the right to abortion and seeing the theocons win, and the Republicans then lose their power.

Washington Post offers a Roberts primer: "As a lawyer in the administration of President Bush's father, he helped write a Supreme Court brief that said, 'We continue to believe that Roe (v. Wade) was wrongly decided and should be overruled.'"

MoveOn's sound bite: "The president has chosen a right wing corporate lawyer and ideologue for the nation's highest court instead of a judge who would protect the rights of the American people."

Right Wing News reports joy, joy. joy across the right side of the blogosphere. Power Line says "Pop the champagne corks, conservatives. Roberts is a fantastic choice, a brilliant and bulletproof conservative" and notes a Democratic weakness:

"When he was a deputy Solicitor General is that in 2003, he was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the traditional training ground for the Supreme Court, by a unanimous vote of the Senate. So it seems a little difficult for the Democrats to go back now and try to resurrect these old issues."

Instapundit notes that "Joe Lieberman put him forward as a compromise candidate who would be easily confirmable." So again Fake Dem Joe becomes the GOP's bipartisan fig leaf.

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