Easygoing Roberts braces for confirmation fight

Pete Williams Justice correspondent • Profile

WASHINGTON - No black limousine for John Roberts on his first day as a Supreme Court nominee. He drove his Chrysler PT Cruiser to the White House for morning coffee with President Bush. Those who know him say he's always had that easygoing style — growing up in Indiana, near Chicago as the son of a steel mill executive and working at that steel mill in the summer.

He was also captain of the football team at an all-boys Catholic school, where he excelled academically.

"John was just the kind of student that, he just ate everything that you gave him," recalls former teacher Lawrence Sullivan.

He met his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, on a blind date. She's a Washington lawyer and a former board member of Feminists for Life, a group that counsels against abortion and pushes for the legal rights of mothers.

It's Roberts' own views on abortion that Democrats will pursue. As a lawyer in the first Bush administration, Roberts helped file a brief in the Supreme Court in a 1990 abortion case. It said "Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

But at his confirmation hearing two years ago for a federal appeals court judgeship, he said he was representing his client — the government — and that he saw it otherwise.

BIO: Judge John G. Roberts Jr. Currently: U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Born: Jan. 27, 1955 Education: Harvard University undergraduate degree, B.A., 1976; Harvard Law School, JD, 1979. Career: Law clerk, Judge Henry J. Friendly, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1979-1980; law clerk, Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, 1980-81; special assistant to U.S. Attorney William French Smith, 1981; associate counsel to President Reagan, 1982-86; member of Hogan & Hartson's Appellate Practice Group, 1986-1989; principal deputy solicitor general, 1989-1993; head of Hogan & Hartson Appellate Practice Group, 1973-2004; U.S. Court of Appeals 2003-present Noteworthy: Roberts had been in line to join the appeals court in 1992, but his nomination during the first Bush administration died in a Democratic-controlled Senate. He has generally avoided weighing in on disputed social issues. Abortion rights groups, however, have maintained that he tried during his days as a lawyer in the first Bush administration to overturn Roe v. Wade. Source: MSNBC research

"Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land," Roberts said in April 2003. "There's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent."

But women's groups want senators to press him further.

"And if he cannot answer those questions in a way that demonstrates that he in fact does support women and women's health and safety, then we will need to oppose him down the road," said Planned Parenthood President Karen Pearl.

Answering questions is a Roberts specialty. He's argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court. Before each one, he'd touch the court's huge statue of former Chief Justice John Marshall for luck.

And if that luck holds for Roberts, a former William Rehnquist clerk, he'll become the first justice to serve on the Supreme Court bench with someone he once worked for. 

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