Obama and Roberts

Some dissents from this dissent:

Perhaps Obama simply recoiled at the quid pro quo implied by Roberts' meeting with Bush on July 15 2005 - the same day he overturned the Hamdan verdict - not to mention all that had gone before. Most people would regard it as unethical for a judge to have a private meeting with a plaintiff during a hearing, but Roberts thought nothing of meeting with Cheney, Miers, Rove and Gonzales during the arguments and deliberations of Hamdan.

And another:

I'm a lawyer, an economic & foreign policy conservative/social liberal (is that a "pragmatic liberal" or "libertarian conservative"?), who would have voted against Roberts in the Senate. Unlike your dissenter, I have probably voted for Republicans and Democrats equally. Roberts' credentials are stellar, but his equivocal, perhaps ambiguous, answers at the hearings combined with features of his career in private practice sent up red flags.

Those same credentials also gave him something of a free pass through the hearings. In the few instances where he was actually made to answer the hard questions, he revealed himself to be exactly what he is turning out to be: a pragmatic conservative radical closely aligned philosophically to Scalia, but with more finesse and discretion.  The "blue dogs" who joined with the Republicans are, for me, the ones who betrayed their principles in the name of political expediency. 

Obama was in a better position than most senators to see through Roberts' facade of reasonableness and recognize the essentially radical judicial philosophy driving him.  I view his vote on Roberts as an imprimatur of his balanced outlook and philosphical integrity.  Roberts is no friend of individual liberities.  He is a statist of Cheneyian dimensions. History will be the arbiter, but my bet is that Obama's vote will be vindicated over time.  In close cases Roberts will prove himself an ally of the unitary executive - as long as that executive shares his agenda; he will uphold the right of government to legislate morality and limit personal liberty; he will, under the guise of theoretical pluralism, uphold in fact a favored position for Christians under the First Amendment.