This
sure is interesting:
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts worked behind the scenes for a coalition of gay-rights activists, and his legal expertise helped them persuade the Supreme Court to issue a landmark 1996 ruling protecting people against discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
Then a lawyer specializing in appellate work, the conservative Roberts helped represent the gay activists as part of his law firm's pro bono work. While he did not write the legal briefs or argue the case before the Supreme Court, he was instrumental in reviewing the filings and preparing oral arguments, according to several lawyers involved in the case.
The coalition won its case, 6-3, in what gay activists described at the time as the movement's most important legal victory. The three dissenting justices were those to whom Roberts is frequently likened for their conservative ideology: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Two things. First, I am really, really tired of hearing people say, "He's just a lawyer. He advocates for clients. He doesn't necessarily agree with them." That's bullcrap. Lawyers - especially those with a lot of seniority - get to choose where they work and whom they work for. You don't wanna represent big corporate polluters? Then you don't work at a firm which represents those kinds of companies. And so on. Not every attorney always has this kind of flexibility, but most do, and Roberts certainly did.
This is especially true of pro bono matters, where even the most junior of associates at even the biggest firms have a choice of projects they work on. The pro bono clients a lawyer takes on can really say a lot about him or her. (Not necessarily, but they sure can.) So hey, I'm glad Roberts helped out the good guys in this case.
But is he?
Roberts did not mention his work on the gay-rights case in his 67-page response to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire released Tuesday. The committee asked for "specific instances" in which he had performed pro bono work, how he had fulfilled those responsibilities and the amount of time he had devoted to them.
Sixty-seven pages long, and they're claiming it was an "oversight" that he forgot to mention it. Yeah, just like that whole Federalist Society membership memory-lapse. Roberts is starting to develop soap opera-level amnesia. But it's not hard to imagine why he would try to hide his involvement in this case.
Which leads me to the second thing I wanted to mention, which is that according to some commenters here, the merry citizens of Freeperville are not happy about this. Maybe Billmon is indeed right - that Roberts will wind up getting savaged from the right, and that wingers will fear (and perhaps even oppose) him as "another Souter." Dissension on the right can work to our advantage here.
(Via SusanHu.)
Update [2005-8-4 12:2:54 by DavidNYC]: Just to make it clear, I very much doubt something like this could derail the Roberts nomination. But I'm taking the long view here: If Roberts turns out to be a bit more moderate than the wingers are comfortable with (and his work on this case might, just might be evidence of that), it may leave them feeling betrayed and angry at the Republican power establishment. And a split between the conservative elite and base is almost always a good thing for our side.