Roberts should testify — later (April 20): Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) has good reasons to invite Chief Justice John Roberts to testify about Supreme Court ethics reform. But the testimony date should be moved to late summer, not next month.
More importantly, Durbin should make clear in a revised invitation that his intention is not to create a forum for an inquisition in absentia against Justice Clarence Thomas. While recent controversies involving Thomas’s financial disclosures (or lack thereof) have brought the question of high-court ethics to the forefront, the subject should indeed be fair and reasonable systemic reform, not the political targeting of one justice….
Roberts declined, but that shouldn’t end it (April 26): Even if his concerns were not entirely unfounded, Chief Justice John Roberts was probably unwise to reject so categorically an invitation to appear at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.
Now, however, he should offer an alternative….
Alito didn’t rule this one based on politics (April 18): When Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay last Friday that temporarily keeps an abortion drug legal , he exposed the Left for lying about his jurisprudence.
For years, the Left has smeared Alito as a partisan hack rather than the careful adherent to text that he actually is. According to this portrayal, Alito is “ perpetually aggrieved ,” an “ angry man ” waging a “ crusade against a secular America ,” one who is “ambitious and extreme,” and “zealous” with a “snide pugnaciousness.” And, in a prototypical disparagement, former federal law clerks David Lat and Zachary Shemtob distinguished Alito even from other high-court conservatives by accusing him of being a “blanket partisan” who “consistently votes for the conservative policy outcome in any given case.”
In the conservative legal world, nothing could be a bigger insult than to be accused of enacting policy preferences rather than following the law as written.
Alito’s April 14 order provided the most recent proof that the insult was baseless….
