Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Chief Justice Roberts Bush's Best Appointment

Chief Justice John Roberts was at the University of Miami yesterday. My daughter and my wife and I were at UM Sunday at the Communications School, which had a lot of its students interned out for the talk, in front of 3000 guests. Nugget quote:
"Not a single person has voted for me and if we don't like what the people in Congress do we can get rid of them, you know, if you don't like what I do, it's kind of too bad. And that is to me an important constraint," Roberts said. "It means that I'm not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences."

Roberts is rapidly proving why he is the best person who possibly could have been selected for the position, showing every attribute of a judicial personality, including a welcome self-effacing role for judges in the face of rampant judicial activism.

As Roberts noted, nobody voted for him. Too bad the crazies on the 9th Circuit out in SF or the loonies in Massachusetts are self-referential egoists. Their lack of judicious temperment has led to pernicious social and moral turpitude becoming the order of the day.

Not to mention crime on the rise.

In many countries, the lack of an independent judiciary has led to widespread abuses in many areas, but the United States is an example of where the opposite extreme has also led to bad public policy.

1 comment :

Glaivester said...

you know, if you don't like what I do, it's kind of too bad. And that is to me an important constraint," Roberts said. "It means that I'm not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences."

That's not actually true. The fact that he cannot be thrown out of office actually means that he can make a judgment solely based on his personal policy preferences or political preferences. What it prevents him from doing is making a judgment based on the voters' political preferences. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but not equivalent to what he is claiming. If he chooses to interpret the Constitution rather than to rewrite it, that is a good thing, but his un-electedness only bears on that to the extent that he would make decisions based on electoral concerns.