Leave it to the political left to treat a serious issue in a
frivolous manner. The case in point is how liberals are now
approaching the issue of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’s life
experience. Instead of considering it as a way to determine
Roberts’s fitness for the job, they use it to score political
points.
The past experiences of a Supreme Court nominee should be a
matter of public scrutiny. Has he made choices that show sound
judgment? Has he, in general, behaved ethically? How has he treated
those around him? Has he ever been affiliated with any extremist
groups like the Nazi Party or International A.N.S.W.E.R.? Such
questions are fair game when it comes time to decide on a nominee.
Sadly, those on the left are instead using Roberts’s life as a
proxy for politics. In so doing, they’ve turned the issue into
something absurd.
For example, in an opinion piece masquerading as an objective
news story, Associated Press reporters Tom Coyne and
Ashley M. Heher suggest that Roberts’s childhood might not have
been sufficiently “multicultural:”
Like many towns across America, the exclusive lakefront
community where Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. grew up
during the racially turbulent 1960s and '70s once banned the sale
of homes to nonwhites and Jews.
Just three miles from the nearly all-white community of Long
Beach, two days of looting and vandalism erupted when Roberts was
15, barely intruding on the Mayberry-like community that was
largely insulated from the racial strife of that era.
…That environment may have sheltered residents from the events
of July 1970, when the arrests of three black men over a parking
violation outside a bar in Michigan City set off two days of
looting, vandalism and fires.
Naturally, this (lack of) experience must be linked to his
views:
Roberts’ criticism of racial “quotas” in some documents
from his work as a White House lawyer has alarmed civil rights
groups and some Democrats, who say he may be a partisan for
conservative causes. Other memos from his time in the Reagan
Justice Department portray an attorney who urged his bosses to
restrict affirmative action and Title IX sex discrimination
lawsuits.
Now, do we really want to hold it against a nominee that, as a
child, he didn’t get to see the windows on his family home being
broken? Most parents, if they are able, try to raise their children
in locales that are generally riot-free. If we are earnest about
applying the must-experience-riot standard, we end up with the
ridiculous result that most children growing up in America are
henceforth disqualified from becoming Supreme Court Justices.
If Coyne and Heher are really serious about Roberts’s exposure
to racial issues, they might bring up the little fact that Roberts
has spent the last quarter century living in the Washington, D.C.
area. That means he endured the Marion Barry era, when a big city
mayor played the race card to fight off any accusation of
corruption and/or incompetence. That part of Roberts’s life, we can
suppose, was deemed unimportant by the liberal powers that be.
Coyne and Heher seemed to be following the lead of columnist
William Raspberry, who last week took a similar tack. Raspberry
extended the critique of Roberts to note that he is the son of a
wealthy man, attended Harvard, clerked for Supreme Court Justice
William Rehnquist, and worked in the Justice Department and White
House. As a result, Raspberry states:
Nothing in that glide path suggests exposure to
anything that might temper his conservative philosophy with
real-life exposure to the problems and concerns of ordinary men and
women. Roberts is undeniably bright…but his life has been one of
quite extraordinary privilege.
“Glide path?” I always thought that most of Roberts’s
achievements took some hard work — what do I know? Anyway, that
glide path informs Roberts’s politics:
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.
Raspberry has indulged that leftist trope of the “personal is
the political.” Roberts’s easy life is what makes him unsympathetic
to the concerns of the “ordinary men and women.”
This missive is really a low point for an otherwise a superb
columnist. Raspberry avoids specifics to make these policies seem
nobler than they are, such as saying Roberts sought to “limit the
reach of Voting Rights Act” when what he really did was argue
against racial gerrymandering. Also notice that Raspberry minimizes
the controversial nature of these policies by claiming they are
part of “the settled mainstream” for “civil rights partisans.” For
the likes of the Alliance for Justice, NAACP, Jesse Jackson, and Al
Sharpton, surely they are mainstream. Yet those aren’t good
yardsticks for measuring the “concerns of ordinary men and women.”
After all, busing elicited huge protests from the common folk, and
affirmative action has been sent packing by a substantial majority
of voters every time it has been on the ballot.
That Raspberry isn’t really serious about Roberts’s life
experience is reinforced by looking at how he treated Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas. After all, Thomas had plenty of exposure
to real-life problems. He was born in a small town in Georgia. His
father abandoned him when he was very young. When his mother was no
longer able to care for him, he was sent to live with his
grandfather. Yet, back in 1991, Clarence’s biography didn’t win
plaudits from Raspberry:
[Thomas] wouldn’t have been my choice. But then no one
likely to be appointed by a conservative Republican president would
be my choice. I believe the court is too conservative already —
too devoted to the privileges of authority and too uncaring about
the rights of ordinary people, too wrapped up in governmental
theory and too innocent of experience as outsiders in a society
dominated by white men.
Given an unfettered choice, I’d opt for a liberal whose bona
fides include a history of concern for the underdog.
From which we can conclude that life experience matters not.
What matters is a nominee’s ideology. The left doesn’t really want
to discuss Roberts’s life experience as it applies to the
requirements of the Supreme Court. They are hoping to derail his
nomination by portraying him as too rich, too white, and too
successful. But don’t be fooled — what they really mean is he is
too conservative.
Sound judgment, good temperament, compassion — all of that
matters when considering a Supreme Court nominee. And all of that
makes the life experience of a nominee a serious matter. Too bad
the left doesn’t treat it as such.
