[Mb-civic] A Bad Shift for the Court - William Raspberry - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Bad Shift for the Court

By William Raspberry
Monday, August 15, 2005; Page A15

If you're concerned about the rightward drift of the U.S. Supreme Court, 
you may be hoping -- as I am -- for a smoking-gun revelation that would 
disqualify John G. Roberts Jr.

Sometimes we even imagine we've found the damning evidence. For 
instance, despite his careful attempts to shield his private views -- 
either by declining to put them in writing or by making it appear that 
the positions he took were merely those of his clients -- we are 
learning some things about the nominee that confirm our suspicions. He 
has been, virtually since his arrival in government, not just a counsel 
but an advocate of positions that, to civil rights partisans, for 
instance, seem well out of the settled mainstream.

He wanted, his memos confirm, to limit the reach of the Voting Rights 
Act, to do away with such race-conscious approaches as school busing and 
affirmative action, to curtail the application of Title IX to equalize 
opportunity for women, and to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to 
hear certain classes of civil rights cases.

And we wonder why none of it seems to matter. Don't the American people 
understand the danger of letting the Supreme Court become, in essence, a 
partisan of one side in a closely divided nation?

In a word, no. I've just looked at something I wrote on the subject more 
than a dozen years ago, and I'm not sure I'd change a word of it now:

<>"Certainly it is within the prerogatives of presidents to name to the 
federal judiciary men and women whose views are more or less consistent 
with their own. But it is also within the bounds of good government to 
keep the courts -- and the Supreme Court in particular -- generally 
reflective of the populace. It's just another way of legitimizing the 
judiciary.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/14/AR2005081401035.html?nav=hcmodule 

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