A Thief on the Court?

[springhill]

Tomgram: A Thief on the Court?


Stop, Thief!
Assessing the Reaction to the Roberts Nomination
By Tom Engelhardt

"At a black-tie dinner for the visiting prime minister of India in the White House State Dining Room that night, Card ran into Justice Clarence Thomas. ‘You're going to love who the president picks,' Card assured him." (Peter Baker, Unraveling the Twists and Turns of the Path to a Nominee, the Washington Post)

When I was young, one of the Philadelphia papers used to run ads for itself in which some poor sap would be hanging from, say, a window ledge over a street and no one in the crowd below would notice because all of them were absorbed in reading the paper. It was an image that came back to me this week as I waited patiently for the outrage to build on the Roberts nomination -- and for the Democrats to act. When it was first reported soon after George Bush nominated John Roberts for the Supreme Court that, in November 2000, with the presidential vote in Florida up for grabs, Robert had flown to that state on his own dollar to "volunteer advice" to its governor -- and presidential brother -- Jeb Bush, I just assumed that howls of outrage would follow from the Democratic camp and that this nominee's hopes would sink beneath the horizon.

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But like almost all stories that start out small and under control when it comes to this administration, you can put your bottom dollar on the fact that they're just going to get bigger and messier and uglier as time goes by. And perhaps it's our good fortune that if Robert's mystery time in Florida in 2000 has proved remarkably insignificant news everywhere else, it has been a significant local story in that state -- and some good reporters seem to be on the case. On July 27th, Marc Caputo of the Miami Herald suddenly expanded the story exponentially (though again, the national press seems hardly to have noticed).

Caputo tracked down Ted Cruz, a policy advisor to the Bush election campaign in 2000, now the Texas solicitor general. It seems that, unlike every other Republican connected to the Florida events, Cruz still had his memory miraculously intact and so told Caputo that "Roberts was one of the first names he thought of while he and another attorney drafted the Republican legal dream team of litigation ‘lions' and ‘800-pound gorillas,' which ultimately consisted of 400 attorneys in Florida." As it happens, among all those attorneys, Roberts should have proved reasonably unforgettable. After all, Caputo writes, "oon after getting the call from Cruz, Roberts traveled from his Washington office at Hogan & Hartson to Tallahassee to lend advice and help polish legal briefs. Later, Roberts participated in a dress rehearsal to prepare the Bush legal team for the U.S. Supreme Court... legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation's highest court, according to the man who drafted him for the job."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=9053