Vote For Judges

 Vote For Judges, Not Politicians

In 2009, Jeffrey Toobin wrote a profile in the New Yorker on the US Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, John Roberts. Despite Roberts’ claim during his confirmation hearing that judges should be neutral “umpires” calling balls and strikes, Toobin found that after five years on the Court, Roberts’ record was unequivocally partisan.

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

This is awkward. Conservatives insist the Constitution is value-neutral, and it’s only those liberal “activist judges” who inject political ideology into what is otherwise a non-partisan document. But Roberts’ record tells a different story.

If Roberts really did nothing more than apply the Constitution to the facts of each case, then we’d have to conclude the Constitution itself is not value-neutral, but in fact embodies very conservative values. Indeed, and very strangely for something that was drafted in the 18th century, it somehow managed to anticipate the specific values of the Republican Party circa the year 2000.

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