Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Liberals have to pick another battle

Rosa Brooks:

THE HARSH overhead lights in the Senate hearing room were unkind to his bald spot, and by Day 2, his baby blues were visibly bloodshot. But John G. Roberts Jr. emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as practically the only person who did not look like an ideologue or a blithering idiot.

His articulate courtesy stood in contrast to the bombast evidenced by both Democrats and Republicans on the committee. Roberts is going to be confirmed — his past seems tediously devoid of the smallest peccadillo, and the American Bar Assn. has given him its highest rating — yet our political process puts the guy through days of largely rhetorical questions. New York Democrat Charles Schumer, for instance, asked whether Roberts was "in the mold" of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, while Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn wondered whether Roberts agreed "that the opposite of being dead is being alive." Democracy in action!

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On substantive issues, Roberts gave answers that should be largely reassuring to liberals. Still, the official liberal response appears to be that we shouldn't believe anything Roberts says because he'll say anything to get confirmed.

The cynics have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Think about it: Unless Roberts is captured on television kicking a wheelchair-bound hurricane victim, he's going to be confirmed, and we knew this well before the hearings began. He had no particular incentive to make nice to the Democrats on the committee — and he could have made far more stridently conservative statements, with little consequence.

Yet he chose, on the whole, to be conciliatory and nonconfrontational, making a surprising number of statements that even appeared to confound some on the far right. On religion, for instance, he told the committee, "I do not speak for my church on public matters and the church does not speak for me," and he added that religious freedom protects nonbelievers as well as believers.

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It's a question of picking one's battles. By waxing hysterical about Bush's surprisingly non-horrendous court choice, liberal interest groups are only playing into the hands of the GOP right, which is always eager for opportunities to paint liberals as shrill, negative and out of touch with mainstream America.

They are only showing who they really are. Let them be themselves. It makes them feel better and it helps conservatives.