That carefully crafted political blank slate of Judge John Roberts is getting filled in piece of by piece.
And what it reveals is an ugly portrait of a backstabbing establishment Republican who subverted the political will of the greatest American president of the 20th century.
Memos drafted by the Supreme Court nominee during his tenure in President Reagan's Justice Department show a distinct hostility to the conservative ideals embraced by his boss and to some of the individuals who championed those ideals.
Take, for instance, a Dec. 14, 1981, memo, obtained by the Washington Times, and written to his colleague, Kenneth Starr, another country-club Republican, who would later bamboozle President Reagan into nominating Sandra Day O'Connor as a Supreme Court justice.
The topic was a book called, "A Blueprint for Judicial Reform," produced by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. The American Bar Association, no friend of the Reagan administration, was quizzing new Attorney General William French Smith about the ideas in the book.
Roberts let his hair down and revealed just what kind of a snake he truly is in this memo he probably thought would remain forever a private communication.
"I suggest we keep as low a profile on this as possible," he wrote to his co-conspirator Starr. "Weyerich [sic] is of course no friend of ours, but it won't help to stir up the influential contributors to this volume, and any comment by the AG will simply highlight the fact that we have yet to take a position" on some of the issues raised by the book.
Weyrich is no friend of ours!
Only an anti-conservative would make such a comment.
Weyrich is one of the shining intellectual lights of the modern conservative movement.
You can like him. You can dislike him. But he's a true believer and closely represented the will and ideals of Ronald Reagan, the man sitting in the White House – the man Roberts was ultimately supposed to be serving.
I've seen this kind of weasel all too often skulking around the corridors of our nation's capital – undermining visionary leaders like Reagan, betraying the people who elected them to office, promoting their own personal political agendas.
Roberts is the kind of Beltway creature I most detest. He's not man enough to stand up and tell you what he really believes. He doesn't want to be accountable for defending his positions publicly. So he conspires in the dark behind closed doors and writes memos attacking righteous men who have the courage to operate in the light.
The fact that Roberts twice misspelled Weyrich's name also suggests just how out of touch he was with conservative thought. All conservatives knew Weyrich in 1981. He was seen as one of the architects of the Reagan landslide victory and part of the conservative brain trust that would set the nation on a new political course.
Remember, this is the guy who can't remember if he ever joined the Federalist Society. He's pathological.
Now, I don't consider myself a conservative, but I do consider myself a friend to many conservatives. And my advice to those friends is to recognize right now that John Roberts is the enemy. One of my beefs with conservatives is they never seem to see it coming. They didn't recognize what Ken Starr was and is. And they still don't see the handwriting on the wall with John Roberts.
Roberts was an insider then defending the indefensible policies of the permanent bureaucracy of the Justice Department that was out to thwart Reagan initiatives.
He's a backroom "fixer," and he's just been rewarded for his underhanded wheeler-dealing with a lifetime nomination to the Supreme Court – and he will not be denied, not by the fat-cat Republicans who dominate the U.S. Senate.
In another memo to French in 1982, Roberts showed he understood how easy it was to win over conservatives with a simple phrase – a gimmick now employed with great success by President Bush.
When preparing the attorney general for an interview with the editor of the Conservative Digest, he suggested dropping the phrase "judicial restraint." That would do the trick.
Hey, isn't that the very same phrase that Bush used in announcing his nominee to the world?