End of benefit of the doubt

It has been hard for me to work up much energy for denouncing Judge John G. Roberts, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee. After all, I knew I was never going to like anyone Bush would be willing to nominate, so it is going to take finding something pretty awful to get me into a proper sweat over this guy.

Actually, I'm almost grateful that Bush didn't go the talking dog route, offering a fascist woman and/or person of color. There's no pleasure in observing the contortions of the viciously ambitious. Or maybe simply crazy.

But the picture above catches what immediately rankled about the guy -- he, and his family, look just like all the smug upper class twits I left behind by choosing to go to college at Berkeley in the sixties instead of one of the Seven Sister colleges.

As Robin Givhan writes in today's Washington Post:

It has been a long time since so much syrupy nostalgia has been in evidence at the White House. But Tuesday night, when President Bush announced his choice for the next associate justice of the Supreme Court, it was hard not to marvel at the 1950s-style tableau vivant that was John Roberts and his family.

Okay, so they flunk looking fashionable or even passably contemporary. Is that a crime? Certainly someone like me who once gleefully accepted the label "frumpy" can't go there.

But today, buried in the last paragraph of a New York Times roundup of Robert's judicial opinions, came this:

. . . he was impatient that same year with Thomas Penfield Jackson, a trial judge who ignored sentencing guidelines in determining that Darin M. Tucker deserved probation rather than imprisonment for possessing cocaine. Judge Jackson declared that he was "not going to be an instrument of injustice."

That was unacceptable, Judge Roberts wrote. "To the extent the district court based the departure on its belief that the sentence was unjust," he wrote, "it relied on a factor that is clearly impermissible under the guidelines."

If it is good law to enforce what is unjust, law loses any claim to morality; without a moral claim on society, law is simply superior force. This is a view that can only be held by someone smugly confident that he has the guns and will continue to wield them indefinitely -- a 1950s US upper class white boy perhaps?