The Calm After the Storm

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Minutes after Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork in 1987, Senator Edward Kennedy charged onto the Senate floor and thundered that the ascension of the conservative judge to the Supreme Court would be the end of America as we know it. Kennedy's blast set the tone for that doomed nomination, so White House officials felt no small amount of relief last week at the reception that John Roberts received when he made his trip into the liberal lion's den. Roberts emerged from Kennedy's office with his hide intact--and a map of Ireland. Sure enough, Kennedy had been assembling every scrap of information he could get about Roberts and had discovered that the ancestral home of Roberts' wife is a mere 10 miles from that of Kennedy's mother in Limerick.

All year, Washington has been gearing up for a monster fight over filling the first Supreme Court vacancy in 11 years. Instead, the city watched its political generals and foot soldiers put their guns back into their holsters last week. After his meeting with Roberts, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid went so far as to praise the work Roberts had done on behalf of environmental interests in Reid's home state of Nevada. Interest groups, having raised millions in anticipation of war, quickly returned to fighting over Karl Rove. The closest thing to a battle plan that Senate liberals could come up with was to demand internal Justice Department documents they almost certainly will not get. Democrats were reduced to hoping they might hit some political pay dirt by scrutinizing what Roberts had written about the reach of the Constitution's interstate-commerce clause, which has figured in environmental and workplace regulation as well as civil rights cases, but is usually barren terrain politically.

In his first round of private interviews with Senators, Roberts described himself again and again as "modest"--a deliberate word choice that liberals would read as suggesting he wouldn't overturn previous court decisions on issues like abortion and that conservatives would read as reassurance that he wouldn't be setting social policies from the bench. He also followed the advice of his designated handler, former Senator Fred Thompson, who plays a legal sage on Law & Order but is turning out to be a political one in real life. "They like to talk," Thompson told Roberts as they met with Senators, "so let them."

And yet the relatively easy path ahead for his first Supreme Court nominee may be as much an indicator of Bush's weakness as of his strength. His sagging approval ratings, the public displeasure at events in Iraq and his inability to win support for his Social Security plan suggest that Bush doesn't have the leverage he once did: he could not afford a nominee so toxic to Democrats that the move would unravel the truce struck by a bipartisan group of 14 Senators and possibly trigger a filibuster.