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| SHIELDS AND BROOKS | |
 July 22, 2005  | |
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Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the nomination of federal appeals court judge John Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court and Senate Democrats' reaction to the nomination.
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JIM LEHRER: And now our Friday night analysis of Shields & Brooks, syndicated
columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And I'd have to say that John Roberts has won every news cycle. He's -- there must be some perverse satisfaction that President Bush takes compared to the reaction that his father's nomination of Clarence Thomas was greeted with, the criticism and I mean, almost universal praise. So I think you'd have to say that John Roberts had a very, very good week. JIM LEHRER: Do you agree?
And I think you'd put (Antonin) Scalia in that category. But after that wave, you had people who were more establishmentarian and Roberts, he's certainly a member of the establishment. And so he's got a lot of friends and also much calmer demeanor, less likely to offend. If there's somebody in America who doesn't like him, he hasn't shown up yet. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The nominee's visit with Democratic senators | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| JIM LEHRER: Yeah. What about his visits with the senators, particularly the three, (Edward) Kennedy, (Dick) Durbin, and (Charles) Schumer, who voted against him the first go around before the Senate Judiciary Committee, what's your reading of how that went? DAVID BROOKS: He did the grand ego tour.
DAVID BROOKS: Well he met a lot of big egos up there in the Senate. JIM LEHRER: Oh, I see. DAVID BROOKS: So far it seems -- you can never tell because they're all smiling in public. Schumer gave him a list of 47,000 questions or something, what kind of tree would you be if you were a tree -- MARK SHIELDS: No, it wasn't that.
JIM LEHRER: And almost immediately, too. DAVID BROOKS: They don't wait for you to finish a sentence. If he can handle that brilliantly and be one of the best in the country, you have to figure he can handle one of these hearings. How deeply he wants to go into his record will be between he and his strategists. One suspects he won't go very deeply at all. JIM LEHRER: Mark, what have you heard the Democratic senators? MARK SHIELDS: Well, Sen. Kennedy I talked to today and he said that - I mean, he praised on the record his intellect, his integrity, they found him enormously likable. He doesn't believe that -- just as Sen. Schumer doesn't, that a hearing out to be a gotcha process and come up with some question that the witness or the nominee has never heard before. He believes in giving the questions beforehand that they want him to answer. And he raised -- JIM LEHRER: So, you took offense at what David just said.
And it truly is. I mean, there's no question about it. All you have to do is go from "Plessey versus Ferguson" the Supreme Court absolutely sanctioned, gave moral credibility and legal status to enforced segregation of the races, separate but equal. And the same court, the same Supreme Court two generations later by a 9-0 move repealed it and said, "No. That is wrong, that's un-American, that's unconstitutional." So the power is enormous, the power to change American life. And Sen. Kennedy cited in particular the Tennessee case last year, which I think all of us followed where the person in the wheelchair under the Americans for Disabilities Act had to crawl up two floors of stairs - flights of stairs -- to get to the courtroom. And the Americans with Disabilities Act required the court to make accessible. It was approved; it stood by a 5-4 decision with Sandra Day O'Connor. And so questions like this, I think, are the kind that he can expect to get. I mean, where would you be on something like this? And those are -- that's quite beyond the abortion thing, which is obviously underlying the whole fight. |
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| The Senate hearings | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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DAVID BROOKS: I'd say two things. First, Robert Bork went into those hearings and thought he was in a seminar. The most interesting hearings to listen to are the ones least likely to get the guy confirmed. Whereas Justice Thomas -- JIM LEHRER: Explain -- what do you mean?
But the people who don't answer, who make it as boring as possible and that includes from Justice Thomas to Justice O'Connor, they tend to go through. The other thing that strikes me about him is, and this is a mind, I'm guessing, but we know people like this, very developed views about process, about how the government should work, about how strong the president should be; not so much developed views about what we would consider substance about the morality of abortion. He may have it, but it's private. Or how much stability should govern. I would say one interesting thing that happened today finally was when he went into see Arlen Specter yesterday. He said the importance of constitutional stability. And Arlen Specter ate that up because that is a reference to stare decisis. That is a reference, I'm not going to go there overturning precedent. And that would be comforting to a lot of people in the middle and on the left. MARK SHIELDS: A lot of people on the left, but I mean, just to return to "Brown versus Board of Education." Eight-year-old child in Topeka was barred from attending the school eight blocks from her house, from her own home and had to walk two miles to the school because she was black. All right. The court said we could go for societal stability. That was the argument to keep it. That's the way it had been in this country ever since the Civil War and how do you interpret the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which grants equal protection? And the Warren Court said "No, equal protection is not separate but equal." And so, I mean, stability comes with a price. And --
MARK SHIELDS: Well, certainly. I think history would -- JIM LEHRER: Rightness over stability. MARK SHIELDS: History would pay testimony to the Warren Court for bringing America, for starting the second reconstruction of this country that led to the legislation of the 1960s, which made America a more just place. DAVID BROOKS: I think it depends who's in the majority. If you have a liberal majority, then the Democrats want the court to be aggressive. When you have a conservative majority, it tends to be the conservatives who say you've got to overturn settled precedent like "Roe v. Wade." And the Democrats are much more likely in this climate to be comforted by stability. |
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| Opinions of the nominee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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JIM LEHRER: Let me pick up on something Mark said, David. In fact, I think we probably said it among us here that this decision of President Bush to choose the nominee, to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, could be one of the most important decisions he will make. And he's made it. Three days later, does it look that important? DAVID BROOKS: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I think it's tremendously important and a reflection of the man and I would say this. He's not actually a rabble-rousing Scalia type. He's much more a reflection of a Roberts. He's much less theoretical, much more into calm demeanor, professional management and Roberts is a modest view of the court.
The very qualities - I mean to bring a court together, to get majority opinions. That was the first thing. The second thing is that Sen. Kennedy said short of going to war, it's the most important decision that any president makes and that the Senate makes: the Supreme Court Justice. JIM LEHRER: Clearly you all feel that same way? DAVID BROOKS: He could be there for the rest of our lives. MARK SHIELDS: I'll just add one thing and that is if Senate Democrats are smart, ok, what they will do is they'll accept the inevitability of his being confirmed. But they'll lay down the predicate for the next one. JIM LEHRER: For next time. MARK SHIELDS: And the very qualities that they praise in Justice -- in soon to be Justice Roberts: Fair-mindedness, respect for his adversaries, support from both sides of the aisle, even tempered, intellectual -- JIM LEHRER: All the things that David just said. MARK SHIELDS: That's right -- that's what we want in a judge and that should be the test for the next one because chances are they may be defective in a couple of those categories.
JIM LEHRER: The hearings are definitely -- pretty definitely now going to be in September, not in August, right? MARK SHIELDS: It will be in September, but it's going to take more than a skeleton in his closet. It's going to taken an entire graveyard in his closet for the people on the other side to get revved up. |
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| Timing of the president's announcement | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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JIM LEHRER: Mark said the other night, David, the night of the president's announcement, and you took offense to this when Mark said that the president speeded up his announcement of Roberts in order to change the subject away from Karl Rove. Did it work if that was, in fact what he had in mind? DAVID BROOKS: I didn't take offense. I took civil disagreement.
DAVID BROOKS: I'm so inspired by it. No, I really don't think -- I think for us in the media, the Rove thing has become an obsession. I do not think it's an obsession in the White House where they're dealing with India over the past week, they're dealing with Australia; they're dealing with issues that are just absorbing them. When I look at what's happening with the Rove thing, it's like a game of Clue. It's not a reporting story because we've got four little facts and a gigantic castle of speculation about those facts. We don't know the key answers to any of the important questions and so there's all these theories spinning around, but we don't know who did what to who and that remains true it's going to remain true for another six weeks, probably. JIM LEHRER: But there is the memo. What do you think about the State Department memo? MARK SHIELDS: I just disagree with the David. His own paper, the Washington Post, Walter Pincus, one of the greatest national security reporter who ever lived, Bloomberg is now out this afternoon with obvious leaks -- and that there's conflicting testimony from Rove who said that Bob Novak had told him, allegedly testified Bob Novak told him it was Victoria Plame and that Novak when he testified said he did not tell him, that he already knew it. That Scooter (Lewis) Libby, the chief of staff of the vice president said that Tim Russert had told him the name. Russert testified reportedly that he never mentioned, received or offer -- JIM LEHRER: Russert didn't tell him?
JIM LEHRER: What do you think of that? DAVID BROOKS: Well, there are all these memos floating around. There are memos from the State Department, memos from the CIA. The president was on a trip to Africa. They were all shooting around. You've got an investigation going on. Somehow it'll all come out. And I assume the investigator has the ability to question the reporters, the White House, the CIA, the Senate, the State Department, frankly, more than the White House does and it's the investigator's job to find out what will happen and I suspect he'll do it and it will happen a few weeks from now. But the idea now, because we have conflicting testimony to say, "Well, it was Karl Rove" or all the other theories we have going around; the theories are just way out ahead of where the facts are. JIM LEHRER: All right. Well we'll resolve this next time. MARK SHIELDS: You better believe it. JIM LEHRER: Yeah, right. Okay. Thank you both. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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MARK
SHIELDS: Politically, Jim, it looks like a ten-strike, a grand slam. In a political
campaign and, let's be frank, this is a political campaign Scott Reid, the Republican
campaign manager once put it, you have to win every day, you have to win the morning,
you have to win the PM, you have to win during the day. 
DAVID
BROOKS: Yeah, completely agree. As Mark said, the stories were all very positive.
They praised his intelligence, every quote you get whether it's from Cass Sunstein,
the liberal, or David Boies, another liberal, it's all positive. It's been a love
fest. And I think the reason is -- and this is sort of systematic of the Republican
Party -- is that you had a wave of Republicans who were revolutionaries, who were
storming the barricades. 
JIM
LEHRER: The grand ego tour? 
DAVID
BROOKS: And this will be actually the subject of the hearings, which is how deeply
can we probe? I happen to think that the guy has held himself up brilliantly,
apparently, at Supreme Court grillings. And if you listen to those tapes or seen
those hearings, those are brutal. The Justices are coming at you from all directions.
MARK
SHIELDS: It's not what kind of a tree or what's your favorite color and is autumn
your favorite season; it's -- the fundamental question is the Supreme Court --
as William Howard Taft, a president who served on the Supreme Court as Chief Justice
said, "Presidents come and go, the Supreme Court remains." It's always
there. It endures. It is dominant.
DAVID
BROOKS: Because Robert Bork just thought "Oh, we're having a discussion here.
Let me air some ideas. I've got some theories about this; I've got some theories
about that." Well, there were just vulnerabilities all across the field.
It was fascinating to listen to it about natural law and things like that. 
JIM
LEHRER: So you're saying if you're going to go on the Supreme Court, what a Democrat
or what some people would be looking for is a willingness to make that kind of
leap? 
MARK
SHIELDS: Let me just add to that, Jim. First of all one of the smartest Democrats
I know said this week if Bush is smart, and he's certainly smart with nominating
John Roberts, this Democrat said this is good as we'll ever get, in quality, intellect,
integrity and all the other fair-mindedness -- that he -- if and when, not to
sound ghoulish, if and when Chief Justice William Rehnquist leaves, is a superb
nominee to be Chief Justice. 
DAVID
BROOKS: Let's remember three months from now it's going to look different then
now. The blogs are going to get revved up, the interest groups are going to get
revved up; there's going to be a passionate opposition. It may be small, but it'll
be there. And it'll be interesting to see how far --
JIM
LEHRER: Civil disagreement. All right. 
MARK
SHIELDS: On any of this. So I would have to say that, you know, in a strange way,
Jim, the president is uncurious George in this case. He could get to the bottom
of this just like that. I mean he said at the outset "I want to find out.
I want to make sure what happened." All he has to do is bring these two guys
in the office and say "What happened, fellas?"