Everybody Loves Roberts

I just watched some of the brief debut of President Bush's new nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge John G. Roberts.  He smiled a lot and looked handsome and friendly, and actually had much more poise than the President.

The Orlando Report has a pretty good brief summary of Judge Roberts' record.  Roberts was nominated by President Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. circuit in 2003.  He was confirmed with relatively little opposition by Democrats only a few months later.  He also has received accolades from both Republican and Democrat members of the legal community.  And since most of his legal career has been as an attorney, he has a very sparse paper trail.  All in all, he seems like a good candidate.

There's an old salesman's trick that involves getting your customer to answer "yes" to a series of seemingly inconsequential questions ("May I take off my coat?  May I get a drink of water?  May I use your rest room?) before you begin asking important ones.  The idea is that if your customer is accustomed to answering your questions with "yes," then he will be more willing to buy whatever it is that you are selling.

I believe that President Bush is using this trick on the Democrats.  They have already answered "yes" to Roberts' nomination to the D. C. circuit Court.  They have answered "yes" by way of compromise to the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen, the three Bush Federal judiciary nominees that Democrats targeted as the most conservative (and therefore the most "dangerous").  And these two big "yeses" will make a Democrat borking of Roberts' Supreme Court nomination very difficult, particularly since Roberts has enjoyed such strong bi-partisan support in the past.  Roberts is also replacing Sandra Day O'Connor, who -- like Roberts -- is not a hardcore conservative in the mold of Scalia or Thomas.  His nomination is not likely to tip the ideological leaning of the court.

All of this leads us to the really big question, which is who will replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist.  That nomination is the one which will really tip the ideological balance of the court.  Will that nominee be the next Scalia?  Maybe, but for sure that President Bush is setting up the Democrats in Congress so that they will have to say "yes" to whomever he nominates, or lose a lot of political clout by engaging in a mean-spirited public smear campaign.  And if Bush's nominee to replace Rehnquist is a minority or a double minority (like Janice Rogers Brown, who is female and African-American) then the Democrats will have a hard time convincing average Americans that they are looking out for minorities by trying to banish one from the Supreme Court.

Obligatory link/Trackback whoring:
PowerLine, WizBang, and the ubiquitous Michelle Malkin, who as always has the best roundup of 'net writing and also live-blogged Bush's speech.

DJ Drummond at PoliPundit has a good roundup of moonbat hysteria over Roberts from Daily Kos.

And Michelle Malkin explains why Bush was smirking during his introduction speech.