BUSH'S ROBERTS-FOR-CHIEF PLOY -- a Black Day for America

George Bush's announcement this morning that John Roberts is his nominee to  replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a clever move. The Senate Democrats have already thrown in the towel on confirming Roberts as an associate justice -- there have been a few grumblings, but the Democratic leadership (and its troops) have their eye on the off-term legislative elections next year, Roberts is polling extraordinarily well (the carefully constructed photo ops of the attractive Roberts and his family in the days following his first nomination played well in the country, which judges on image more than record) and the Democrats saw no political points to be made, when the country goes to the polls next year, in opposing Roberts for associate justice. There is not a single Democratic Senator who has as yet announced opposition to Roberts for that post -- let alone the dozens that would be needed for a filibuster. So much for principle.

Thus, Roberts' confirmation as Chief Justice will be fairly easy sailing -- rapid favorable action by the Senate, which is under pressure to give the Court a Chief before its fall term opens October 3, is a foregone conclusion; and the Democrats, eager to get this issue out of the way and resume beating up Bush on Katrina -- will quickly fall into line in favor of the new Chief.

As horrific are the results of the Katrina disaster and Bush's failure to prepare for or respond to it, in the long run it is the death of Rehnquist and the nomination of Roberts that are far more important and will have the most lasting impact on the country. By being able to fill two Court vacancies -- Bush will soon nominate a new associate justice in Roberts' stead -- this most conservative White House since the Coolidge era will be able to put a conservative lock on the Supreme Court for decades (Roberts relatively young age means he's got a good thirty-plus years of judicial mileage left on him) . With two new hard-right judges, any microscopic hopes of putting together five-member Court coalitions to frustrate some of the Republicans' more outrageous Constitution-shredding assaults on what remains of our civil liberties are eradicated. The Bill of Rights is already under ferocious attack from the conservative Republicans and their Christian right shock-troops. This symbiotic collaboration has a host of cases -- some brought to challenge liberticide legislation passed by the Republican Congress, some by Christer lawsuits designed to further demolish the barriers between church and state and roll back the clock on progress by women and gays -- are already making their way up the judicial food chain to the Supreme Court, and a number of them are to be heard in the Court's coming fall term.

One of the most attention-getting will be the case involving the Bush Administration's legal assault on Oregon's right-to-die-with dignity law, which John Ashcroft began the effort to nullify and which Alberto Gonzales is also committed to erasing. The new Chief Justice is a devout Roman Catholic, and his church was in the forefront of the Terri Schiavo case. The ultra-right Christer lobby, the Family Research Council, has already given its stamp of approval to Roberts, telling the Washington Post this morning, "We have a measure of confidence that he would be better on our issues than Sandra Day O'Connor." What FRC means by "our issues" are things like diminishing abortion rights and the criminalization of homosexuality (O'Connor voted against the former and for striking down the latter).

The political character of Bush's new nomination for associate justice is hardly in doubt. After all, in 2002 Bush declared, ""We need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God, and those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench." That's what he's been doing, and that's what did when he made Roberts chief, and that's what he'll do with his second Court nomination to guarantee the Supremes have an unshakable theocratic majority. Lawsuits trying to prevent the federal government from spending tax-payer dollars on political patronage and religious propaganda disguised under the anodyne label "faith-based initiatives" will be definitively doomed. And so will future challenges to Patriot Act-style intrusions on an individual's right to privacy in political thought and action (a careful examination of Roberts' record reveals he doesn't really believe there is a Constitutional guarantee of a right of privacy -- which is also the basis for Roe v. Wade).

Once these liberties and protections against theocracy are gone, we won't get them back. That's why Rehnquist's death giving Bush two Supreme Court nominees -- and Bush's announcement this morning of a new committed anti-privacy theocrat as Chief Justice -- is a very black day for our country's future.