Democrats Prepare Ground to Challenge Judge Roberts (NYT)

[bettyellen]

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, July 22

- As the Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts continued courting senators, Democrats began laying the groundwork on Friday to challenge him in his confirmation hearings, in part by seeking to shift the focus from volatile issues like abortion to the broader subjects of personal privacy and government power.

snip.....

"Be careful that you don't translate this entire process into a referendum on Roe v. Wade," Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and a member of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters on Friday after meeting with Judge Roberts for about 40 minutes.
Mr. Durbin said he did not expect the nominee to offer his view of that 1973 decision, which first established abortion rights and could come up again before the court. But Mr. Durbin said he did expect him to discuss the constitutional principles underlying the decision - and specifically the right to privacy that the court first established eight years earlier in Griswold v. Connecticut, which involved the far less controversial right to buy contraceptives.

snip...
.....(Senator) Kennedy warned of "an enormous danger" if the Supreme Court turned away from the broad New Deal interpretation of the Commerce Clause. "Can you imagine the sort of nation we would be if each state had to pass each civil rights law separately?" he asked. "We would be a lesser nation."

more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/politics/politicsspecial1/23confirm.html?hp&ex=1122091200&en=fb39f9e37379e238&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[babylonsister]

1. It would be nice to trust our Dems to do the right thing.

I hope they do, and if that means a filibuster, so be it. What do we have to lose?

[bettyellen]

2. if we don't demand answers, we're never going to get them.

we cannot sell our selves out by not asking.