Judge Roberts Confirmed!

Judge John Roberts is now Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts! This is a great victory for conservatives, and for liberals as well though they don't know it. I'll explain later.

The biggest surprise for me was the number of votes John Roberts recieved. I never thought he would get more than 70 votes because the Senate Democrats have made such a habit of opposing President Bush's nominees to the top judicial positions in the nation. The fact that he got 78 votes says to me that there are 8 more open minded Democrats in the Senate than I thought there was. What was not a surprise was the people who voted against him. Ted Kennedy has always been opposed to anyone he even suspects might be conservative and has spearheaded several successful efforts to stop people he thinks are too conservative from being confirmed to lifetime judicial appointments. Then there is the rest of the Psycho-Gaggle, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry all voted no as well. How unsurprising.

Barak Obama was a bit of a surprise for me. After all of his rhetoric during and after his successful campaign to become a senator he spent a lot of time talking about geting past the partisanship. I had hoped that he meant all partisanship, but apparently he only meant Republican partisanship. This is a dissappointment, but not totally unexpected. It seems like every Democrat who gets to the nation's Capitol falls in line with the Psycho-Gaggle. That is why, despite my fierce sense of independence, I became a Republican a few years ago (I was once an Independent) and cannot ever bring myself to vote for a Democrat in a national election. It seems like no matter what I think of the Republican candidate, and it's usually good, but occasionally bad, I cannot trust the Democratic candidate not to turn into a Ted Kennedy clone.

Judge Roberts confirmation as Chief Justice is a great victory for us all because he is a brilliant conservative judge. He is also restrained in his rulings and will not overturn past rulings just because he does not like them. This is good for conservatives because he will be a reliable ally on the courts when various Freedom of Religion cases come before the courts, as well when Eminent Domain comes back to the Supreme Court. In the last decade the Supreme Court has really overstepped its' bounds in these cases and we have an ally in the fixing. It is good for liberals because Chief Justice Roberts in unlikely to overturn precedent in other hot-button issues like abortion where there has been no clear violation of the Constitution from his viewpoint even though he disagrees with it (though I hope he does). As much as I would have liked a Scalia or Thomas clone I am exstatic with Chief Justice Roberts' confirmation, and you should be too.