Activist Judge?
“Judges are like umpires,” [Chief Justice John] Roberts said [during confirmation hearings]. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see an umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than [Justice Antonin] Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party. … Roberts’s service on the Court, which is, of course, likely to continue for decades, offers an enduring and faithful reflection of the Bush Presidency (44).
Toobin, Jeffrey. “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” The New Yorker, May 25, 2009: 42-51.
[...] GBitch provides a good link to this article, and there’s a lot to see here. My main beef is that these folks don’t seem to see the White Privilege from which they’ve received great benefit. Roberts says that affirmative action mandates the “recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates.” Wrong, fucker, wrong. AA requires that we give people a look who aren’t on the inside track, who weren’t the privileged sons of rich folks who got them in the door of the CEO’s office. Here’s what Roberts believes: The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. [...]