Which Democrats will vote 'yes' on Roberts?

Dean calls for Roberts rejection
The Democratic Party’s leader, Howard Dean, urged Democratic senators Friday to reject Roberts. The nominee “missed his opportunity to disavow, back away from or explain the litany of right-wing views on key Constitutional freedoms he has advocated against throughout his career,” Dean said. “This is not the time for a Chief Justice bent on rolling back the progress we have made over the past fifty years….”

And the nation’s leading voice of liberal opinion, the New York Times, also called on senators to reject Roberts.

“He has not met the very heavy burden of proving” he has the qualities to be chief justice, the Times said in an editorial Sunday, citing his refusal to endorse abortion, church-state separation, gay rights, and the right of illegal immigrant children to attend public school.

The Democratic Party’s most powerful constituencies — gays, feminists, African-Americans, environmentalists — would be chagrined to see Democratic senators join the Republican majority to give Bush a landmark victory by confirming Roberts.

Even before Roberts testified, the gay rights lobbying group, the Human Rights Campaign opposed him.

“With Judge Roberts on the Court, we can envision a day when the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case is overturned and millions of Americans lose the right to privacy in our own homes,” HRC said.

And in fact during last week’s testimony, Roberts did not make a commitment to uphold Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision that gave constitutional protection to same-sex sexual relations, even though he did endorse the predecessor of that decision, the 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave protection to marital couples’ use of contraceptives.

Biden dissatisfied with Roberts's answers
Of the potential 2008 contenders, Biden’s vote seems the easiest to predict.

The Delaware senator was entirely unsatisfied with the answers Roberts gave during his testimony before the Judiciary Committee.

Biden dismissed as “preposterous” Roberts’s argument that if he gave a senator an answer on a specific case that might come before him, he’d be making a commitment to vote a particular way in exchange for the senator’s vote.

After all, Biden argued, whatever answer Roberts might give now isn’t binding on him because “he’s entitled to change his mind” if he gets confirmed and joins the Court. Given how scornful Biden was of Roberts’s testimony, it is hard to imagine him voting for Roberts.

Biden also voted against Republican Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas in 1991, William Rehnquist in 1986, and Robert Bork in 1987.

Here’s a look at the other potential contenders and how they might line up on Roberts:

Bayh: The conventional wisdom is that the Indiana senator will be the centrist in the Democratic race and that he therefore must move to the left between now and 2008 to align himself with Democratic primary voters, who skew to the left of the general electorate.

Bayh supports Roe v. Wade, but voted for the 2003 ban on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion.

He has already tracked left by voting against the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, as well as voting “no” on Bush appeals court nominees William Pryor, Janice Rogers Brown, and Priscilla Owen.

Clinton: A “yes” vote would disappoint her fans among pro-abortion rights and gay rights groups, but would show that she has enough self-assurance to move to the right with an eye on the 2008 general election. It would be a declaration of independence from Dean, the New York Times, and the liberal consensus.

Like Bayh, she voted “no” on the nominations of Gonzales, Pryor, Brown, and Owen.

Feingold: Unlike Bayh and Clinton, Feingold serves on the Judiciary Committee and got a chance to show his skills as an interrogator by grilling Roberts last week.

Feingold implied strongly that he thought Roberts ought to have recused himself from hearing the appeal of Guantanamo prisoner Salim Hamdan because his work on the Hamdan case coincided with his interviews by White House officials for a Supreme Court opening and thus may have created a conflict of interest.

Feingold, too, voted “no” on the nominations of Gonzales, Pryor, Brown, and Owen, but he is capable of surprise: in 2001 he was one of the few Democratic senators to vote to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general.

But in the 2008 Democratic field, right now he’s the darling of the left and if he wants to run for the presidential nomination he will need to consolidate his base supporters, not alienate them even before the 2008 battle has begun.

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