Roberts has momentum as hearings begin
WASHINGTON —For more than four years, liberal activists assiduously mounted plans to beat back President Bush’s first Supreme Court choice—the first Republican nominee since they nearly defeated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 14 years ago.
But when President Bush announced his choice, John G. Roberts Jr., whose confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee begin today, key liberal leaders waited more than a month to declare their opposition, and even then they didn’t launch mass advertising campaigns. That left a media void that their conservative foes eagerly filled.“They broke their own rule,” said Leonard A. Leo, a leader of the pro-Roberts forces. “They didn’t define the nominee within the first 24 hours.”
Lacking hard evidence about Roberts’s judicial philosophy and encountering his supporters even within the liberal wing of Washington’s legal establishment, a well-funded and primed coalition of scores of interest groups balked. The result, many of their strategists concede, is that Roberts heads into the Senate Judiciary Committee today with a strong public-approval rating and widely held expectations that he will be confirmed.
“The collective silence on our side made his confirmation seem like a foregone conclusion,” said a Democratic strategist close to the proceedings. “It created a sense of inevitability that’s hard to undo.”
Liberal activists expect Bush’s elevation of his nominee to chief justice status to make the proceedings more contentious because “the magnitude of what’s at stake has increased,” said Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way and an architect of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s defeat in 1987 during the Reagan administration.
Source: Boston.com © 2005 New York Times Company
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