Lefties Make a Weak Attack on Chief Justice Roberts

James Oliphant writes a rather silly piece decrying Chief Justice John Roberts and claiming that the Chief has reneged on some unstated promise to be a centrist on the court:

WASHINGTON — With his third term as chief justice coming to a close amid three explosive cases last week, John Roberts has proved to be almost everything conservatives hoped and liberals feared.

Despite pledges during his 2005 confirmation hearing to hew to judicial centrism, Roberts has shown himself to be a reliable member of the Supreme Court's right flank—rarely, if ever, disagreeing with its positions on civil rights, gun control, the death penalty, affirmative action and a host of other issues.

That may come as no surprise to those who paid close attention to Roberts' career before his elevation to the high court, but the picture is at odds with the non-ideological face he presented after his nomination.

"I come before this committee with no agenda, no platform," Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005. "I will approach every case with an open mind."

Roberts branded himself then a judicial "umpire" who called the balls and strikes as he saw them, without reference to ideology.

"Some people will like what Roberts has done and some people will be upset about it, but it is hard to describe it as the work of a 'neutral umpire,' " said Christopher Eisgruber, a professor at Princeton University and an expert on the court appointments process.

Nowhere in that statement does Roberts claim that he will be a centrist. What he claimed was neutrality - there's a difference. The left thinks that centrism means a justice will agree with the lefties some of the time and the conservatives some of the time. Roberts never pledged that at all. Neutrality means he pledged to rule on each case according to the information presented to him and the existing law. I don't see any signs that he's done anything differently from what he stated in his confirmation hearings.

The reality for Oliphant and other lefties is the court has moved in a more conservative direction, not because of Roberts but more because of Justice Alito who replaced the Justice O'Connor who was a lefty one day and a conservative the next. If anyone seriously thought that Roberts or Alito were likely to align themselves with liberal causes, they clearly weren't paying attention.