Just when I think I couldn’t possibly get any more cynical, I realize I’m just not cynical enough. Turns out John “Balls and Strikes” Roberts got onto the Supreme Court after hiding a conflict of interest so he could rule in a 9/11 case in favor of the Bush administration. Via Rolling Stone:
When he was pitching himself to George W. Bush for a seat on the highest court in the land, John Roberts famously declared that judges should be like “umpires,” making calls but never stepping up to the plate for either team. Bush liked the line so much he didn’t just give Roberts a seat on the Supreme Court, he installed him as chief justice — the youngest person to hold that job in almost 200 years.
A new book, “Without Precedent” — an excerpt of which has been shared exclusively with Rolling Stone — suggests another powerful reason why Bush may have felt such extraordinary confidence appointing Roberts to the most powerful position in the U.S. judiciary.
At the time that Roberts was auditioning for the job, he was also presiding over a critical case to which the Bush administration was a party — and rather than acting as an ump in that case, author Lisa Graves suggests, Roberts was practically pinch-hitting for Bush and his cronies.
The case in question revolved around whether Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the driver for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, should be treated as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions. The three-judge panel on which Roberts sat ultimately ruled in favor of the Bush administration, who argued the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to Hamdan. The ruling was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and Hamdan’s conviction was ultimately vacated.
A judge in Roberts’ situation — interviewing for a job with a plaintiff of a case they were ruling on — would normally be compelled to recuse himself to avoid any appearance of a conflict, but Roberts didn’t. Not only did he not recuse himself, when questioned about whether he ever considered recusing himself, Roberts refused to answer, insisting that the Judicial Canon of Ethics prohibited him from discussing a case that was still pending. (By that time, Hamdan’s lawyers had appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.)
Graves has been a close observer of Roberts’ career for decades. As the chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early 2000s, she was in charge of vetting and recommending judicial nominees. Roberts was one of the first of those pushed through for a confirmation to the D.C. Circuit when Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2001. From the very beginning, Graves says, it was clear Republicans had big plans for Roberts.
“I thought he would be their choice for the Supreme Court, and he would be a destructive choice,” Graves tells Rolling Stone. “And that he would be more effective than his mentor, Bill Rehnquist, who did not have Robert’s charm.”
Her prediction came true: Just a few years later, in April 2005 — days before he was set to hear oral arguments in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — Roberts sat down for his first interview with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
The Hamdan case, Graves argues, was Roberts’ “original sin,” and one that goes a long way toward explaining why Roberts has failed so spectacularly as successive ethics scandals have engulfed the high court. “If you realize what he did to get the job — staying on that case that he had no business staying on, a case where the Supreme Court reversed him ultimately — I think that it reveals that we’ve placed false hope in Roberts being fair, and in Roberts not being motivated by his own desire for power.”
No wonder Clarence Thomas feels so comfortable ignoring the conflict guidelines! The fish rots from the head. Read the rest here.
Somehow, I doubt Morning Joe will feature this book during one of their book chats.
