Everybody Loves Mister Roberts
David Brooks, conservative op-ed columnist for the NYTimes, might be going a little overboard on Everybody's All-American, Mister Roberts in his Thursday mash note:

Roberts nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee with the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee because this is the way government is supposed to work. President Bush consulted widely, moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics and selected a nominee based on substance, brains, careful judgment and good character. [...] Roberts is a conservative practitioner, not a conservative theoretician. He is skilled in the technical aspects of the law, knowledgeable about business complexities (that's why he was hired to take on Microsoft) and rich in practical knowledge. He is principled and shares the conservative preference for judicial restraint, but doesn't think at the level of generality of, say, a Scalia. This is the sort of person who rises when a movement is mature and running things. I love thee also, Roberts nomination, because now we probably won't have to endure another bitter and vulgarized chapter of the culture war. [...] In short, I love thee, Roberts nomination. President Bush has put his opponents on the defensive. He's sidestepped the culture war circus. And most important, he's shown that character and substance matter most.

Hey, get a room, buddy. Well, here's another more middle-of-the-road view from The New Republic, which takes a more cautious, yet still somewhat upbeat tone:

The question of Roberts's judicial philosophy--is he a conservative ideologue with a transformative agenda or a conservative incrementalist with a judicious temperament?--should indeed be the central question for senators to explore in Roberts's confirmation hearings. The difference between an agenda-driven conservative ideologue and a conservative incrementalist is notoriously difficult to define. But Dean John Jeffries of the University of Virginia School of Law provides a tool for identifying the difference by distinguishing between "top-down" and "bottom-up" judges. Top-down judges start with well-developed ideological commitments and apply them to the merits of each case. Bottom-up judges are more engaged by the facts of each case and are willing to follow the relevant legal precedents in whatever direction they happen to lead. Scalia, Thomas, and the liberal activist William O. Douglas are examples of top-down judges; Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O'Connor, and the conservative incrementalist John Marshall Harlan are bottom-up judges. "Top-downs say bottom-ups are unprincipled, and bottom-ups say top-downs are rigid and closed-minded, and both are probably right," says Jeffries. Although there are important differences between them, Scalia and Thomas are top-down judges who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted in light of its original understanding and are willing (Thomas more than Scalia) to overturn decades of precedents that clash with their vision. Roberts, by contrast, has never openly embraced originalism as the touchstone of constitutional fidelity. He has been guided at every stage of his career by an effort to apply existing precedents rather than to transform them. So there are at least preliminary reasons to hope and expect that he may be a bottom-up, conservative incrementalist. As a Supreme Court justice, of course, Roberts would be entirely free to overturn precedents with which he disagrees. The Senate should explore in detail his views about stare decisis, the legal doctrine that says "let the decision stand." Since his judicial record is sparse, senators will have to look for clues elsewhere. Happily, Roberts's writings, from his days as a college student through law school, and later as an appellate advocate and judge, suggest an aversion to grand theorizing that might lead him to take an incremental, rather than a radical, approach to constitutional change. [...] ne way of exploring Roberts's vision of the force of legal precedents might be to focus on his views about Congress's power to regulate the economy and other issues associated with the libertarian movement to resurrect the Constitution in Exile. As an appellate judge, Roberts's record on these questions is hard to discern. In one case, he took a traditionally generous view of Congress's power to condition the receipt of federal funds on a state agency's willingness to waive its immunity from discrimination lawsuits. But, in another case, he questioned whether an application of the Endangered Species Act was constitutional under Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. The second position was more radical than the first under existing law, and both point in very different directions. [...] Given Roberts's dazzling talents--his intelligence, judgment, devotion to legal craft, and palpable belief in the power of reasoned argument to constrain judges in meaningful ways--it seems quite possible that his vision of the force of precedent might evolve and grow during decades on the Court. I don't mean "evolve" in the sense that liberals hope and conservatives fear--that Roberts will become less conservative and more liberal. I mean, instead, that the application of his determined intelligence to the hardest and most elusive questions of constitutional law will lead Roberts to develop a vision of constitutional stability that is uniquely his own. What precisely his vision will be is probably not evident at the moment, even to Roberts himself. But, by focusing on Roberts's judicial philosophy, rather than his views about the controversies of the moment, the Senate can do much to illuminate this crucial question in the confirmation hearings ahead.

The confirmation hearings should be interesting. This guy, as many conservative and mainstream commentators have noted, is not a fire-breathing idealogue. The danger, if confirmed, will be incremental changes to the status of Roe v Wade and other environmental v big business cases that come before SCOTUS.