s responses. Britain today enjoys the luxury of a genuinely loyal opposition, one that deserves more appreciation in Washington as well.–James C. Bennett is president of The Anglosphere Institute and author of the recent book The Anglosphere Challenge (http://www.anglospherechallenge.com).[标签:标题] Over the last couple of weeks opponents of John Roberts’s confirmation to the Supreme Court have been remarkably forthcoming about their strategy: attack his record on civil rights. They intend to thwart his confirmation by portraying Judge Roberts as a regressive extremist whose positions are out of step with current civil-rights jurisprudence. Advertisement They will fail.Their effort thus far has been remarkably flaccid. Roberts’s opponents have seized upon disparate, ostensibly telling phrases in memoranda written by Roberts as a young attorney. Finding little alarming there, (other than sober exegeses on the Voting Rights Act and Title IX, with which they happen to disagree) they’ve pronounced him presumptively hostile to civil rights because,toms shoes online, well, he was appointed by President Bush and has associated with conservatives.Hazel Trice Edney, Washington correspondent for the black press news service NNPA, relates that former U.S. Commission on Civil Rights chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry has “noted that Roberts’ two year record as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit yields little empirical evidence of his anti-civil rights bias, but his legal background and associations give little reason for optimism.” [Emphasis added.]Jesse Jackson maintains that “with his nomination of Judge Roberts,Toms Shoes Outlet, Bush strikes another blow to America’s public policy position (sic), and he sets off a new phase of our struggle for an independent court which upholds the Constitution and protects civil rights and civil liberties. Supporters of voting rights, fair elections and judicial independence have much to fear.”Edney suggests that Ted Shaw, president and general counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, still has an open mind about Roberts (although Sunday’s Boston Globe reports that his “level of discomfort is rising” because of perceptions that Roberts may be the deciding vote to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, the racial-preference case). Shaw’s test for whether Roberts is acceptable for the Supreme Court is rather simple: “The question of whether somebody’s a conservative, that’s not the only question. The question for me is what kind of conservative they are? Whether (the) nominees are going to be open-minded people or whether they are going to be hard, right ideologues whose minds are closed to the arguments of people who bring cases before the court.”It’s clear that at the time they issued the statements quoted above, Berry and Jackson hadn’t reviewed Judge Roberts’s record on the D.C. Court of Appeals. Had they done so, they’d find that Roberts easily passes Ted Shaw’s test: As far as his judicial role goes, Roberts isn’t an ideologue of the Left or the Right; rather, he’s a judge who simply interprets the law. Neither is Roberts someone whose mind is “closed to the arguments of people who bring cases before the court.”If Roberts is a hard-right, closed-minded ideologue one would expect that he’d rarely side with his fellow judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals who were appointed by Democrat presidents. Indeed, one would expect that Roberts would vote with his Republican colleagues and against his Democrat ones by overwhelming margins.But a review of Judge Roberts’s two-year record on the D.C. Circuit shows that if he’s a closed-minded ideologue, then so are all the other judges on that court, whether appointed by Democrats or Republicans.Of the published three-judge panel opinions issued by the D.C. Circuit between June 2, 2003, and July 31, 2005, Roberts sat on 129 panels, 124 of which resulted in unanimous opinions. Roberts voted with the majority 125 of 129 times and authored 45 majority opinions,Toms Shoes Sale, 43 of which were una Related articles: http://mctw54.org/review.asp?NewsID=75 http://centralserver.szunyi.com/index.php?file=Guestbook http://www.mctw54.org/E_ReadNews.asp?NewsID=143