NYT: Chairman Specter Backs White House on Keeping Roberts's Memos

[DeepModem Mom]

Chairman Backs White House on Keeping Roberts's Memos
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: August 11, 2005


WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that he backed President Bush's decision not to release certain legal memorandums written by Judge John G. Roberts Jr., a move that could escalate a fight between Democrats and the White House over Judge Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, wrote to the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, that he had reviewed the law and concluded that the White House was justified in saying the records are privileged. They date from Judge Roberts's days as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration....

***

As Judge Roberts continued making rounds in the Senate on Wednesday, the White House disputed the account of Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who met with him on Tuesday. After the meeting, Mr. Wyden said he had asked Judge Roberts a question intended to elicit his views on Congress's intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died earlier this year after her feeding tube was removed under court order.

Mr. Wyden, whose aides took notes during the meeting, said at the time that Judge Roberts refused to discuss the Schiavo case specifically. The senator recounted Judge Roberts's reply to a more general question: "I am concerned with judicial independence. Congress can prescribe standards, but when Congress starts to act like a court and prescribe particular remedies in particular cases, Congress has overstepped its bounds."

Judge Roberts has not discussed the contents of meetings he has been having with individual senators since President Bush announced his selection in mid-July. But on Wednesday, Ed Gillespie, the chief White House lobbyist for Judge Roberts's Senate confirmation, sent a letter to The New York Times, saying that notes taken by a White House aide during the session reflected a different response: "I am aware of court precedents which say Congress can overstep when it prescribes particular outcomes in particular cases."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11confirm.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1123733506-aDBcnxs30yjOlTZP9b6Rgg

[Carolab]

1. What? I thought Arlen was wising up.

Guess not.

[EST]

2. Gillespie is the same liar he has always been.

How could anyone who has stood up for this crooked bunch ever, ever be trusted again?

[Robeson]

3. No one knows how to cover-up things better than Specter...

...he's a true pro...

[SoCalDem]

4. Of course he would.. Why WOULD the senate ever need to know

anything important about a guy who's about to get a guaranteed job for about 35-40 years...as 1 of 9 who control our laws..

It's no biggie:)

But of course if the guy was a democrat, we would just have to know everything..down to what kind of toilet paper he uses:)

[truthisfreedom]

5. hiding the truth is the MO of bushco. why? because bush can't handle the

truth, and bushco knows the truth is the only thing that will set us free... and they don't want us free. they want us enslaved.

bushco hates us for our freedoms.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. How can legal memoranda as solicitor general be privileged?

WE are the clients, the citizens of the United States, who are represented by the federal government who employs the solicitor general and his staff. We and Congress have the right to inspect those documents.

[acmavm]

7. I got piled on once for stating what a typical republican Spector is.

And how he was no friend to us. This just proves my point.

Just because people are ill doesn't necessarily make them automatically a candidate for sainthood. This guy's no different.

I watched the Anita Hill hearings. I know what both Spector and Biden did to that woman.