John Roberts Nomination Hearings

I stumbled upon the transcripts of the Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of John Roberts' to the D.C. Circuit court.

I am sure these have been publicized before, but I found a few particularly interesting passages. The entirity of this transcript can be found here.

First, Mr. Roberts discusses the role that personal beliefs should make in crafting a judicial decision:

There's no role for
advocacy with respect to personal beliefs or views on the part
of a judge. The judge is bound to follow the Supreme Court
precedent, whether he agrees with it or disagrees with it, and
bound to apply the rule of law in cases whether there's
applicable Supreme Court precedent or not. Personal views,
personal ideology, those have no role to play whatever.

I understand that there is a difference between a Circuit Court judge and a Supreme Court judge in terms of making versus enforcing the law. However, the statement above is fairly strong and says something about Roberts' personal characterization of the job of a judge.

In the following two passages, Roberts talks about his views of having a politically minded judge on the bench:

Yes, you know, if it all came down to just
politics in the judicial branch, that would be very frustrating
for lawyers who worked very hard to try to advocate their
position and present the precedents and present the arguments.
They expect the judges to work justified. And if the judge is
going to rule one way or the other, regardless of the
arguments, well, he could save everybody a lot of work, but the
rule of law would suffer.

He argues that the lawyers prepare and tune the presentation of their case under the assumption that their arguments will be judged based upon their merits and not the alignment of those arguments with a particular political ideology.

He then speaks to the question of having his rulings interpreted as partisan politics:

I know one of the things that frustrates
very much the judges who are on that court, all of
whom are very hard-working, is when they announce a decision
and they're identified in the press as a Democratic appointee
or a Republican appointee. That makes such--gives so little
credit to the work that they put into the case, and they work
very hard and all of a sudden the report is, well, they just
decided that way because of politics. That is a disservice to
them. And I know as an advocate, I never liked it when I had a
political judge, when I was in front of a political judge,
because, again, you put a lot of work into presenting the case,
and you want to see that same work returned.

This must all be taken with a grain of salt since these hearings are largely choreographed. But, I think that his statements show that he has very little interest in being a political judge.

Moreover, he seems to have a healthy respect for the law of our land. If a judge is able to expunge politics, preconceptions and peer pressure from their mind as they deliberate on a case then that is enough to satisfy me. I may not agree with the ruling, but I do agree that the only way to make decisions about controversial subjects is through a rational, clear, unencumbered analysis of the arguments presented.

Of course, I always reserve the right to change my mind!