Stephen Henderson:
It was on the last day of John G. Roberts' confirmation hearings that a crucial disconnect between him and the senators questioning him became clearest.
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., pressed Roberts for more on his approach to civil rights, the environment and disability law, saying he wanted to know about the causes and beliefs that mattered most to the nominee.
Roberts professed allegiance to something quite different.
"I became a lawyer because I believe in the rule of law," Roberts said. "If you believe in civil rights, environmental protection or rights for the disabled ... you're not going to be able to vindicate those rights if you don't have a place where you know you're going to get a decision based on the rule of law."
That seemed to be the tale of the hearings all week. Senators from both parties asked largely political questions, trying to force Roberts to embrace policy preferences they favored. Roberts tried to talk about the law, and painted a portrait of his legal approach that, if accurate, would bring a level of conservative restraint to the high court that some legal analysts say it hasn't had in decades.
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"I think in some cases it would just have been a matter of reframing the questions from a policy framework to a constitutional framework," said Doug Kendall, executive director of the Community Rights Counsel, a public-interest law firm in Washington. "There were some fundamental constitutional values that underlie many of the Democratic senators' questions, but they weren't speaking in terms of law."
Despite that disconnect, Roberts talked at length about his views in a broad range of areas, and positioned himself as a judge with a high commitment to impartiality and open-mindedness.
Restraint was the theme he returned to time and again, insisting that the value he most respects is the limited role carved for the courts, and the judiciary's obligation to hold the other branches of government to their own defined constitutional roles.
He repeatedly spoke of his commitment to precedent and laid out a complicated set of tests he would apply before overturning settled law. A judge's personal disagreement with a ruling, he said, was not enough.
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