Considering Judge John Roberts Jr.

Did President Bush choose a conserative to sit on the United States Supreme Court? Is Judge John Roberts another David Souter, another Antonin Scalia or another William Renquist? The views of conservative pundits on this issue are varied. Below is a sampling of information and opinion about the Roberts selection.

In a 1997 discussion of the latest term of the US Supreme Court, on PBS Newshour Roberts sounds like a conservative. It's worth reading the whole discussion.

Well, I think it’s a moderate court but one that is very serious about the limits it sees in the Constitution, whether it’s the limits on Congress, limitations on the federal government, or limitations on the court, itself. And if it’s a court that doesn’t seem so warm and embracing of theories that are popular on the law school campuses, I hope the other members of the panel will forgive me for not thinking that’s a serious flaw.

The folks at Powerlineblog believe President Bush made a sound choice. (Over)thinking about Judge Roberts

Ann Coulter is not the only smart conservative who wonders whether John Roberts is "one of us." As Scott noted below, Charles Krauthammmer has called Roberts a blank slate. And the astute blogger PoliPundit fears that President Bush has blown the pick.
There are two issues here: (1) is Roberts a conservative and (2) if so, what kind (and how solid) of a conservative jurist will he be. The first issue corresponds to the question, might Roberts be another Souter. The second corresponds roughly to the question, might he be another Powell/O'Connor/Kennedy. The answers, I will argue, are "no" and "probably not."

I'm not aware of any one thing (for example, a ten-year judicial track record) that conclusively demonstrates Roberts' conservatism. But many indicators point that way, and none points to a contrary conclusion. Some examples: Roberts' law school contemporaries (two of whom I know) say he was a conservative at that time. He went on to clerk for a conservative Justice, William Rehnquist. Then he served in two Republican administrations. Why would an attorney spurn high paying opportunities in private practice to work for conservative presidents alongside folks like Ted Olson, Ken Starr, and Hugh Hewitt if he were not conservative? And if he were not conservative, wouldn't his colleagues figure this out? It is correct to say that Roberts did not necessarily agree with a given position he took in a given legal brief on behalf of the government. However, he must have agreed with most of them or he wouldn't have stayed. And, as the Washington Post reported on Thursday, some of the memos he wrote while in government take solidly conservative positions (in one case a more conservative position than Olson had taken). Excerpts from the memos clearly show a conservative turn of mind. So do a number of his judicial opinions. If John Roberts is another David Souter, he should have been a con artist, not a lawyer.

Another Powerlineblog post takes a look back at the 1990 selection of David Souter. Was Souter ever a conservative?

I've been ruminating a lot about David Souter. The myth is that he was thought to be a staunch conservative, but then he "grew in office" once appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and became a liberal.
But that never made sense to me. People don't typically change in that way. Specifically, I began to wonder: what on earth convinced people, particularly GHWB, that Souter was ever a conservative?

And this Washington Post news story describes Roberts as a Young Pragmatist

As an up-and-coming young lawyer in the White House counsel's office from 1982 to 1986, John G. Roberts Jr. weighed in on some of the most controversial issues facing the Reagan administration, balancing conservative ideology with a savvy political pragmatism and a confidence that belied his years.
Asked to review legislation that would have prohibited lower federal courts from ordering busing to desegregate public schools, Roberts, now President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, took on no less a conservative legal scholar than Theodore B. Olson, who at the time was an assistant attorney general and later served as the solicitor general under Bush.