OK.
Evidently some people here at Kos aren't bothering to read anything other than the MSM before coming to an opinion on Roberts. I've run into the statement that Roberts is just a "plain old Conservative" WAY too many times here on Kos. It's starting to become laughable. Drink the Kool-Aid folks... drink the Kool-Aid. Pathetic. Roberts has been groomed by Fundies for 25 years to fill this spot. I can't believe y'all don't get it yet.
But I say: Fuck That!
According to today's Front Page, Roberts said he'll have to recuse himself from any decisions that conflict with his Fundie abortion clinic-bomber-supporting Religious beliefs (see below). Yeah right... recuse himself... not likely. Pleeez...
Here's the situation. Dem's are arguing that Roberts is a Corporatist. I think we're getting a bigtime wolf in sheep's clothing here... but Dems are focused on Plamegate... I just wish they could chew gum and walk...etc. So, they're avoiding the abortion issue even though Roberts has argued in two abortion cases that Operation Rescue's antics in front of abortion clinics were merely free speech and...
In Rust v. Sullivan, Roberts co-authored a brief in support of regulations prohibiting family planning programs that received federal aid from providing any abortion counseling. In that brief, he wrote: "We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled ... The Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion ... finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."
The facts are clear though. This guy, while he might look good in a suit, is Freakout Fundie Corporatist Crazy Numero UNO
What is a corporatist? What is Bush? He's a guy who says a lot but never says anything. Why doesn't anyone know what Roberts thinks? Because he and his wife are lunatics just like all the other hush hush Fundie Bushies in this country. End of story.
Here are the straight-up nasties on Roberts' case history.
Toyota v. Williams
Not long after Ella Williams took a job at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, moving her family all the way across the state because she was so happy to have landed a job alongside other assembly line workers whose average annual pay was $62,000,
she "got lumps the size of a hen's egg in my wrists, and my hands and fingers got curled up like animal claws." Repetitive-stress injuries -- RSI -- accounted for more than a third of the 1.7 million workplace injuries reported in 1999, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Williams was one of those statistics. "I used pneumatic tools that really vibrated, and I was always having to reach above my head," she explained. She pressed Toyota for accommodation. She got some; but later she was put back on another assembly-line job that hurt her wrists again. After a number of legal skirmishes, Toyota eventually dismissed her. "When you get RSI, they show you the door," she said.
...
As corporate counsel for Toyota Motor Company in its case against worker Ella Williams, he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not protect workers with disabilities like repetitive stress injury, even though such workers become so impaired that they can no longer do manual labor.
Roberts is the man who influenced Sandra Day O'Connor to restrict the Americans with Disabilities Act in her 2002 ruling in Toyota v. Williams.
That's funny. I guess she remembered him and gave him the nod?
Here's MORE:
Roberts has had other opportunities to demonstrate his partisanship. As a judge,
he ruled against requiring Dick Cheney's energy task force to release its records to the public. He opposed protections in the Endangered Species Act. Displaying a clear
conflict of interest, Roberts ruled against environmentalists seeking increased government regulation over copper smelters that emit toxic lead and arsenic pollutants; many of those smelters were owned by members of the National Mining Association. Just four years before, Roberts had filed a brief against citizens opposed to the coal industry's destructive mountaintop removal, on behalf of the same National Mining Association.
Last Friday, Roberts voted to support Bush's military commissions to try suspected terrorists, finding that the protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply to anyone the administration believes is a member of al Qaeda. Bush established those commissions to deny the accused due process protections that are well-established in US and international law. Although he would probably recuse himself from this case if it reached the Supreme Court, Roberts is likely to walk in lockstep with the Bush administration in its "war on terror" and concomitant war on civil liberties in the years to come.
Roberts also showed his true colors when he argued for the expansion of religion in public schools, against a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who was fired by Toyota, against federal affirmative action programs, and against a congressional effort to enable minorities to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But Roberts is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He was a member of "Lawyers for Bush-Cheney" and served as a legal advisor to Jeb Bush during the recount in the 2000 presidential campaign. He has donated to the political campaigns of several Republican candidates, including one senator on the Judiciary Committee that will vote on Roberts's nomination. He has spent most of his career as a corporate lawyer, and he comes to the Court with a partisan agenda.
...
[IF NOTHING ELSE READ THE FOLLOWING!!!!!]
At the end of the Supreme Court's 2000 term, Roberts told a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, "The conventional wisdom is that this is a conservative court. We have to take that more skeptically. On the three issues the public was most interested in - school prayer, abortion and Miranda rights - the conservatives lost on all."