This is yet another nasty taste of the bitter consequences of the George W Bush presidency, when Roberts was placed on the high court.
This betrayal (again) by a Republican appointee should put the stake in the heart to the argument that we have to vote for Republicans to ensure we will get good Supreme Court justice nominees!
Bush goes back on word by nominating Roberts
Friday, August 5, 2005
Editor, Commonwealth:
Don't look now, but President Bush has broken his promise to nominate another Thomas or Scalia to the Supreme Court.
During the campaign, President Bush promised the American people that he would nominate a constitutionalist Supreme Court justice after the likes of Justices Thomas or Scalia. Many conservatives held their noses and voted for the president only because they believed that promise. When he nominated John G. Roberts Jr. to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, President Bush broke that promise.
During his Senate confirmation hearings to the Court of Appeals in 2003, Judge Roberts declined to call the Roe v. Wade decision, which
authorized executions of innocent unborn children, an example of judicial activism. He went on to testify that there was nothing in his
personal views that would prevent him from applying that judicial outrage. The conscience of Judge Roberts will not stop him from signing
off on the murder of babies because he is, after all, "just following orders." Apparently, President Bush believes that a man who embraces the "Nuremberg defense" is an appropriate nominee to sit on the nation's highest court.
Roberts' disregard for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights doesn't stop at approving cold-blooded murder. Three years ago, Roberts argued in Livestock Marketing Association v. USDA that the government could compel ranchers to pay for co-op advertising of beef products, even when the advertisements were against the interests of the specialized beef they were trying to sell.
In Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, Roberts again sided with the government and the liberal Ninth Circuit in 2002 in arguing that the government could bar landowners from developing their property without any compensation at all. The Supreme Court, as in the recent Kelo eminent domain case, stripped the landowners of their Fifth Amendment rights, with Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas dissenting.
As an Appeals Court judge, Roberts displayed his opposition to the rule of law and plain justice in Acree v. Iraq and USA. He sided with the Bush administration's demand that U.S. military veterans who were tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War should be stripped of the money damages they won in federal court. Defying the legislative intent of Congress, Judge Roberts and his cohorts on the federal bench ruled that Iraq shouldn't pay for unspeakable acts of brutality against American POWs because the Bush administration wanted to spend the seized Iraqi assets instead on other projects in Baghdad.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the great poet-prophet Isaiah denounced such judicial injustice: "Woe unto those who rule unjustly, and deny
justice to the needy, and strip the poor of what is fair." President Bush promised us a Scalia or Thomas. Instead, he has nominated a man who helped big government trample the rights of property owners, a man who suspends the punishment of terrorists and sadists and denies justice to their victims, a man whose conscience doesn't stop him from rubber-stamping the murder of innocent unborn children.
/s/John Pittman Hey
Greenwood
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