There is evidence in David Savage’s article today in the Los Angeles Times that perhaps Judge Roberts really is a Scalian textualist.
In October of 1984, the president [Reagan] was set to conclude a campaign speech in South Carolina with the rousing line that the United States was “the greatest nation God ever created.”
Roberts said he had no legal objection to the president’s prepared remarks. He added, however, that the final line struck him as “ill-advised and, particularly in the light of the focus on the religion and politics issue, a likely candidate for the ‘Reaganism of the Week.’ ”
“According to Genesis, God creates things like the heavens and the earth, and the birds and fishes, but not nations,” Roberts wrote.
I would think that Judge Roberts’s knowledgeable familiarity with the text of Genesis, along with his lack of any “legal objection” to President Reagan saying that God created the United States, must be giving the willies to Sens. Leahy, Kennedy, Durbin, Boxer, et. al. They will probably want to question him closely on his exegetical views in general and Genesis in particular. I bet at this moment they have their clerks and friendly law school advisors writing memos arguing that it violates the wall of separation between church and state for a White House lawyer to quote the Bible in his advice to the president.
Well, now you have done it. Clearly, anyone with exegetical views is not in the mainstream. Now if he had hermeneutical views, that would be different. We certainly cannot have anyone serving as a justice on the US Supreme Court who has exegetical views.
Thanks for the good find. I still have my reservations about Roberts and worry that he might be a Souterist, or worse, as Ann Coulter has warned.
If Roberts truly does follow in Scalia’s rather large originalist footsteps, there are sure to be times that I’m disappointed in his rulings. But it won’t be due to his just making laws up based on his personal “feelings.”