Funmurphys: the Blog

The Supreme Choice

President Bush has nominated John Roberts for the Supreme Court. I haven't heard of him before, but I'm sure I'm going to know far more about him than I ever wanted to. No doubt I'll hear conflicting reports - some will extoll his greatness, and some will hammer his wrongness. Already people have been calling him brilliant, which frankly isn't what I'm looking for in a judge. But I have taken some comfort in his opinion in the french fry case: "The question before us," Roberts wrote, "is not whether these policies were a bad idea, but whether they violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution." That isn't brilliance, that's common sense, and spot on. And it just seems to this non-student of the Supreme Court the longer a judge is on that bench, the more they rule based on the belief that bad ideas are unconstitutional.

I was disappointed that President Bush didn't nominate a woman, but not just any woman, a particular woman, namely Ann Coulter (who sounds kind of peeved she didn't get the nod but does have a point). Judge Roberts was selected in part because he would be approved by the Senate; a Coulter nomination on the other hand would not be approved but would provide glorious theater and encouragement for extremists of both stripes. I would hope for a total lack of decorum, lots of lunges for the jugular, and at the end of it all, catharsis.