Legalities
Life, Politics and the Law From ABC News Correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg
Jan Crawford Greenburg is a correspondent for ABC News' bureau in Washington DC. She covers politics, the Supreme Court and provides legal analysis for ABC News. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago's law school and is a member of the New York bar.
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Conservatives' Supreme Cause
January 20, 2007 11:20 PM
Click here and you can read my article in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section titled, "The Cause Bush Did Justice To." It offers a sketch of some of the broad themes of my new book,Supreme Conflict out Tuesday from Penguin Press.
With the miasma in Iraq and a historic midterm election that wrested control of Congress from Republicans, many have labeled Bush's presidency an unmitigated failure. Yet no historian will be able to write that Bush failed to follow through on his campaign promises regarding the Supreme Court. His nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito -- two of the most conservative justices to reach the court in many years -- will be felt for decades to come.
Bush fulfilled his early vow to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. Together with those two justices, Alito and Roberts make the Roberts Court the most conservative Supreme Court in half a century. Tomorrow on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, I'll tell some of the details behind the failed nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court.
January 20, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (4)
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Can anyone provide a direct citation for the oft-repeated assertion that Bush promised to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas? Google and lexis have failed me. When writers provide a cite for this, they generally cite others who are just repeating the assertion. Does anyone have a direct quote from Bush, or at least a time and place for the assertion? Is it an urban legend?
Posted by: Just wondering | Jan 21, 2007 11:06:34 AM
Pretty thorough reporting on the oft-repeated assertion is available here: http://mediamatters.org/items/200510130005
Posted by: anon | Jan 21, 2007 11:34:36 AM
Jan,
I'm not sure if you're reading the comment thread, but I'm curious about something: Are you sure that Alito and Roberts each are going to be reliable conservative votes in the coming years? It is certainly possible, but as far as I know neither Roberts nor Alito have actually cast the votes to show this. If history is a guide, Justices often end up voting differently than we thought at the time of their confirmation.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Jan 21, 2007 7:25:02 PM
Jan,
The statement that "Bush fulfilled his early vow to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas" does rather beg the question of what you (and Bush) think that mold is. After Zedner and Gonzalez-Lopez, I'm not sure how it can be contended that Alito, in particular, is "in the Scalia mold"? It doesn't seem right, either, to call Roberts as being in Thomas' mold. Both the Chief and Justice Alito seem, more than anything, to be in the mold of the old Chief. You label "Roberts and Alito [as] two of the most conservative justices to reach the court in many years"; that might be so. But, with respect, that fact alone does not make them in the mold of Scalia and Thomas; any such mold must surely be made of those jurists' shared commitments, not points on which they diverge, and it seems to me that their mold is procedural more than it is substantive, an approach rather than a set of results. It isn't clear at all that Roberts and Alito fit into that mold.
Posted by: Simon | Jan 22, 2007 9:42:29 AM
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