Roberts

As I prefer hopeful optimism to uninformed distress, I will happily adopt Jeffrey Rosen's opinion as my own. I trust Rosen, the legal affairs writer for TNR, is right about the little we know from Roberts' judicial past. More importantly, Rosen discusses the types of questions the judiciary committee might ask that are important, as opposed to hot button, case specific hoonany.

To begin with, senators should forget about the government briefs Mr. Roberts signed about Roe v. Wade, school prayer and other hot button issues. It's clearly not fair to hold him accountable for defending the George H. W. Bush administration's official positions. After all, that was, at the time, his job.

Instead, the Senate should explore Judge Roberts's judicial philosophy and temperament. He has been on the appellate court for only two years, however, so clues in his judicial record are necessarily sparse.

But based on his record throughout his career, he does not appear to be a rigid Constitutional "originalist" in the tradition of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. These men believe that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted in light of its original understanding; they are willing (to different degrees) to overturn years of Supreme Court precedents in the name of constitutional fidelity.

Having spent decades arguing before courts rather than sitting on them, John Roberts has never embraced one grand legal theory to the exclusion of all others. On the contrary, he has been trained to cast a wide net in order to reach a convincing result. Inflexible originalism is a theory embraced by academics and crusaders, not practicing lawyers who must persuade judges of different stripes.

...

Perhaps one clue to Judge Roberts's leanings on the force of precedents can be found in the outlook of one of his judicial heroes, Henry Friendly, an appellate judge for whom he became a clerk in 1979. Friendly was famously cautious, a man devoted to incremental rather than radical legal change. It might be illuminating for the senators to ask Judge Roberts what he admired about Friendly, and why.

Another potentially fruitful line of questioning might center on Judge Roberts's views about the scope of Congress's power to regulate the environment and the economy.

Give the entire article a read.