Souter-phobia
BARNES, FRED
Souter-phobia Remembrance of nominees past shaped Bush’s decision. BY FRED BARNES IN THE DAYS before President Bush picked a Supreme Court nominee, the White House was gripped...
...I’m glad we had Souterphobia...
...She would, Miers said...
...He was endorsed by much of the Washington legal community and by colleagues from the Reagan and first Bush administrations...
...He has no doubt about Roberts’s skill as a lawyer...
...But Roberts didn’t have as vigorous a backer as Judge Edith Brown Clement did...
...Still, he has to prove himself to several conservative Republican senators worried about a repeat of Souter...
...Roberts went through the confirmation process before, when he became a judge on the U.S...
...He’ll be a free agent once he’s on the court,” Brownback says...
...But, loyal to the president, he calls Roberts a “fabulous nominee...
...One is how Roberts treats the matter of precedent...
...Sen...
...In naming Souter, Bush had passed over another judge he’d interviewed for the job, a real conservative from Texas named Edith Jones...
...They both recommended Clement as the type of conservative justice Bush was committed to nominating...
...Rove, too, was interested in finding out if Roberts was really a conservative and would remain one on the court...
...Souter turned out to be a flaming liberal, so much so that Senator Ted Kennedy now regrets having voted against confirming him...
...At least Bush aides thought the messages were from Scalia...
...Senator David Vitter of Louisiana and his wife Wendy attended a small dinner at the White House on June 30...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Roberts has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court...
...But it wasn’t enough...
...The interviews lasted from one hour to nearly two...
...It wasn’t that Souter, who’d served on the New Hampshire Supreme Court and, briefly, as a federal appeals court judge, misled his interrogators on the staff of the elder Bush...
...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia...
...For conservatives, however, his elevation to the High Court was a mistake for the ages...
...The president received messages through intermediaries that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia felt Roberts would be a great addition to the High Court...
...Bush is looking to pick relatively young justices...
...Sessions says Roberts shouldn’t be “too committed to not reversing precedent...
...By then, Miers had already checked with the other senator from Louisiana, Democrat Mary Landrieu, to see if she would support Clement...
...The other is abortion...
...Bush advisers studied how the nomination of Souter came about...
...He came away convinced Roberts is no Souter...
...Roberts is not a “stealth” nominee in the Souter mold...
...I just don’t know him,” says Sen...
...Brownback says a Democratic senator told him, “I may not vote for Roberts, but I’d hate to argue a case against him...
...Roberts will be asked about his statement in a 2003 questionnaire that Roe v. Wade is “settled law...
...A White House official said Bush doesn’t expect Roberts to “grow in office...
...He intends to question Roberts in Judiciary Committee hearings on “his view of the Constitution and the role of the courts...
...Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff, and legal counsel Harriet Miers talked to the candidates for the court at length...
...Roberts outshined Clement in the Bush interview...
...Sam Brownback of Kansas says Roberts “doesn’t seem to be a Souter...
...Besides the Bush interview, Roberts had to pass another test, the Rove interview...
...Sessions says two issues will be important in the hearings...
...The question was whether they’d be the same 25 years from now as they are today—in other words, just as conservative...
...Several weeks later, Vitter returned to the White House to meet with Rove and Miers...
...We know a lot more about Roberts than was known about Souter,” a Bush aide says...
...But he wants to be certain...
...It shows two things...
...Soon enough they will...
...Tom Coburn of Oklahoma...
...Now think about the 25-year yardstick that Bush applied in his first Supreme Court selection...
...If we hadn’t asked these questions about judicial philosophy and the view of the court’s role, the nominee wouldn’t have been John Roberts...
...Bush and his aides desperately wanted to avert the disaster that befell his father’s White House in 1990...
...Sen...
...Roberts is 50, so he could sit on the bench for two or three decades...
...Bush found John Roberts the most impressive...
...Absent a startling revelation, Roberts should win confirmation with relative ease...
...If they don’t have that, what they say doesn’t matter...
...I don’t have any enthusiasm until I know someone...
...BY FRED BARNES IN THE DAYS before President Bush picked a Supreme Court nominee, the White House was gripped by Souter-phobia...
...All five were deemed to be conservatives...
...Personal integrity is the most important issue...
...A lot of people don’t understand how much the president cares about the courts,” says a Bush aide...
...The reason: Confirmation of Souter looked easier and probably was...
...Sessions’s view is he shouldn’t preclude overturning that 1973 decision...
...The problem was that the White House “didn’t ask, ‘Are you a conservative, why, or when did you become one?’” an aide to the current president says...
...Fear of another Souter led George W. Bush to seek the answer to a single question when he interviewed five potential nominees...
...Jeff Sessions of Alabama favored Michael Luttig, a judge on the 4th Circuit U.S...
...He decided Roberts would not lurch to the left as Souter had or even drift in that direction as other Supreme Court appointees of Republican presidents have...
...They didn’t ask any of those questions...
...Court of Appeals, to replace retiring justice Sandra Day O’Connor...
...And he wants justices who will turn the court to the right and keep it there for years...
...The elder Bush, on the advice of his chief of staff John Sununu and Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, picked an unknown judge, David Souter, for the Supreme Court, thinking he was a conservative...
...Those questions were asked of Roberts...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 43
