The conservatives’ appalling support for Roberts

A VFR reader and long-time loyal supporter of the conservative movement has had it, really had it. She writes:

I am amazed at the tepid reaction of conservatives to the news that John Roberts helped fashion the gay rights case in Romer v. Evans. The conservatives don’t realize how stupid they sound. They say that the fact that Roberts helped in the case does not mean that he supports the gay rights agenda. But that’s besides the point, since he helped to achieve a landmark ruling that fundamentally altered our laws in a way that any conservative should have found abhorrent. Also, from what we’ve heard, his advice was crucial in the eventual victory of the homosexual agenda, since Romer v. Evans helped lay the groundwork for Lawrence v. Texas, and possibly prepared the way for gay marriage at some point in the future. The fact that he may not have supported the cause makes it almost worse, because it suggests he has no principles in the matter, or was trying to ingratiate himself with colleagues, or display his broadmindedness, and is therefore an opportunist and careerist.

But even apart from whether he supported the cause or not, the decision represents just the kind of judicial activism that as a supposed conservative with a conservative legal philosophy Roberts could have been expected to eschew. Moreover, the decision overturned a popular referendum in the state of Colorado, and you would think as a conservative Roberts would have been sympathetic with the efforts that various states have been making through referenda to hold back the judicial usurpation of politics which, again, is of primary and urgent concern for any real conservative.

Then, when I heard Rush Limbaugh accept Fred Thompson’s smarmy, dishonest defense of Roberts’s work in the case (which Thompson himself didn’t even sound convinced about), I truly felt that contemporary conservatism has lost its soul. Rush acts as if the worst thing about this revelation is that the Left is trying to use it to undermine Roberts’s nomination from the Right. Even if that is the case, so what? Either there is a principle or there isn’t, regardless of who brings the issue to light. Conservatives have been completely undone because they feel they have to support this president no matter what. The truth is that this president has disappointed them and they can’t admit it. He promised a Thomas or a Scalia. Would Thomas or Scalia have given pro bono aid to the gay rights activists in Romer? I don’t think so. Conservatives have tried to comfort themselves with the thought that Roberts is at least a Rehnquist, but I doubt that even Rehnquist would have taken on such a case, gleefully welcoming it as an “intellectual challenge.” That’s our culture at stake, Mr. Roberts, while you’re busy seeing how you can stretch and bend the law for the bracing exercise of your legal expertise.

Are the conservatives so sure of Roberts’s position on abortion that they are willing to sacrifice everything else for it? In that regard, have they forgotten that he said that Roe v. Wade is settled law? Are their standards so low that they can sit still for one thing after another like this? Doesn’t it bother them that in the whole year during which the White House was winning them over to Roberts, they never heard about Roberts’s work in Romer? Doesn’t it bother them that he withheld that information from the Senate Committee, making him seem a little sneaky? Can they admit that with a Republican majority in Congress, they were hoping for a real conservative, and, as anyone can see who is not blinded by worship of Bush, Roberts is not that? Does anything bother them anymore, or are they so happy with their access to power, such as it is, that they have become nothing but lapdogs to the Republican Party?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 07, 2005 04:50 PM | Send