New Court emerges

CW FISHER He's just been sworn in to a lifetime appointment as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, yet no one, not even the President, has a clue about where John Roberts stands on any issue, which means his hearings were a complete success. Supreme Court confirmation hearings are awkward by nature, mainly because Senators enjoy using their C-Span minutes to their best advantage and amusement. First they want to thank everybody by name. Then they want to tell an unrelated story tied to an unrelated point. This goes on until the nominee squints, shifts and reaches for his water glass at which time the senator drops the bomb, timed to explode when he swallows. The bomb is a hot button issue framed in the form of a 'What if?' question. But the bomb isn't what you might think. If this were baseball, the bomb would be the easy lob over the plate. What if the hearings had gone the way of Clarence Thomas, back when the the big question was whether or not Anita Hill put a pubic hair on his can of Coke? We never found that out either, so Thomas got through, and today he's one weirdass Supreme Court Justice, a man whose ideas border on the insane. And he got through. He got through not by lowering the bar, but by excavating the bar. Here's something we can all be thankful for: Antonin Scalia didn't got the job. Imagine that 'what if' scenario. Scalia's a swaggerer. Justice doesn't swagger. Dick Cheney swaggers. Justice doesn't. Bush now has one more appointment. It could go to a woman, like his wife wants, or it could go to a white guy, like George. Or it could go to a Hispanic guy named Alberto Gonzales, Bush's first choice, the man who shredded the Geneva conventions, a lawyer whose primary vantage point of the Constitution has always been from its farthest edge. Oh well. It's a spectator sport. It's where a third of the power of the US government resides, but the people have no power over any of it. Such a strange and oddly papal process.