SCOTUS-blogging

Before President Obama nominates the most liberal such & such in the history of such & such to the Supreme Court, throwing the earth off it's axis, flipping the magnetic poles, opening up the Constitution to infestation from legalese devouring law weevils and forever damaging this country, it is important to note the importance of the whole process. Take, for instance, John Roberts. Whereas we get to dismiss the rest of the Bush Administration as a time of crazy excess when we were run by a deranged collective of escaped mental patients, we're stuck with one of their major decisions, the 54 year old Chief Justice Roberts, for decades after the fact. Centuries even, if he decides to fashion himself into a machine of hate, powered by clockwork gears and his hate of socialism. Then there's Alito.

To that end the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin has taken a extensive look at Roberts career and decisions so far and, surprise surprise, has found him to be a hard-line conservative who sides almost uniformly with the prosecution.

In the past four years, Roberts and Scalia, while voting together most of the time, have had a dialogue of sorts about how best to address the Court’s liberal precedents....According to Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, “The Chief Justice talks the talk of moderation while walking the walk of extreme conservatism.”
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On issues of Presidential power, Roberts has been to Scalia’s right—a position that’s in keeping with his roots in the Reagan Administration. “John was shaped by working at the White House, where you develop a mind-set of defending Presidential power,” the lawyer who worked with Roberts in the Reagan years said. Just a few days before Bush appointed Roberts to the Supreme Court, in 2005, Roberts joined an opinion on the D.C. Circuit in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that upheld the Bush Administration’s position on the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.... Last year, Roberts dissented from Kennedy’s opinion for a five-to-four Court in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 violated the rights of Guantánamo detainees. Roberts saw the case as mostly a contest between the executive branch and the rest of the federal government. “Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” Roberts wrote in his dissent. “One cannot help but think . . . that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.”
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Roberts’s solicitude for the President and the military extends to lower-profile cases as well. In Winter v. National Resources Defense Council, the question was whether the Navy had to comply with a federal environmental law protecting dolphins and other wildlife while conducting submarine exercises off California. Roberts said no. “We do not discount the importance of plaintiffs’ ecological, scientific, and recreational interests in marine mammals,” the Chief Justice wrote. “Those interests, however, are plainly outweighed by the Navy’s need to conduct realistic training exercises to ensure that it is able to neutralize the threat posed by enemy submarines.” Though Roberts was writing for only a five-to-four majority, he added, “Where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question.”

All in all, worth spending a chunk of your time reading. Not only does it show the direction the Court has tipped in the past few years, but it shows the importance of the whole process and highlights the complete lack of scrutiny and phony procedures that go into picking a Court Justice. If the President picks 'em they must be good, then they're shuffled through a confirmation where they try to hide as many of their opinions as possible, and then they get confirmed onto a seat where they'll sit for 40 years. It seems to be kind of important, maybe we should pay a little more attention as a country.