Democrats cave on reactionary chief justice: Senate panel rubberstamps Roberts nomination

Leahy, the Vermont liberal who is the senior Democrat on the committee, signaled the capitulation of the “opposition” party in a tortuous speech on the Senate floor Wednesday. Leahy spelled out a series of reasons for voting against the nominee, including his record of opposition to civil rights protections, his unwillingness to answer questions on such key issues as abortion, and the White House refusal to release documents from Roberts’s service in the first Bush administration. Leahy then announced, at the end of this discourse, that he would vote for Roberts anyway, based on the judge’s personal assurances that he was “no ideologue.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid set the stage for this spectacle of dithering and self-contradiction, announcing a day earlier that while he would personally vote against Roberts, he would not attempt to rally the Democratic caucus on the issue. There would be no pressure on individual senators, and no effort to mount a filibuster, as the Senate Democrats did against selected ultra-right nominees for lower-ranking judicial positions.

The incoherent and inconsistent posture of the Democrats is revealed in the rationale the two senators offered for their decisions. Leahy, who supports abortion rights, said that he would vote for Roberts because his testimony before the Judiciary Committee suggested that he would not “overrule or undercut the right of a woman to choose.” Reid, who opposes abortion, made no reference to the issue in his declaration of opposition, focusing instead on “unanswered questions” about Roberts’s views on civil rights. “I must resolve my doubts in favor of the American people whose rights would be in jeopardy if John Roberts turns out to be the wrong person for the job.”

After Reid and Leahy went their separate ways, the rest of the Democratic caucus divided roughly along geographic lines, with most senators from the Southern and Midwestern states carried by Bush in the 2004 presidential election announcing they would vote for Roberts, while those from the east and west coasts, in states that Bush lost, announced their opposition.

The defeated Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, and his fellow Massachusetts liberal, Edward Kennedy, made speeches attacking Roberts and the Bush administration’s refusal to release documents from his tenure as deputy solicitor general from 1989 to 1992, when Bush’s father was president. Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California declared their opposition primarily on the grounds that Roberts might vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Those Democrats announcing their support for Roberts included Max Baucus of Montana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, as well as Feingold, who is widely reported to be considering a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Kerry’s speech was typically conflicted. Speaking of Roberts, he said it “may turn out that he will be an outstanding chief justice, but I cannot say with confidence that I know how he will approach constitutional questions of fundamental importance.” He criticized the confirmation process as “increasingly sterile” and “little more than an empty shell.”

That description is, if anything, an understatement. The week of hearings before the Judiciary Committee amounted to a carefully scripted game of dodge, in which Roberts repeatedly declined to answer questions about his views on a wide range of legal and political issues, offering only the most banal platitudes about respect for the institution of the Supreme Court and preserving the Constitution.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/robt-s23.shtml