John Roberts: Satan's Cabbage Patch Kid.

My god, I can't wait for the Roberts confirmation hearings to end! An empty charade that is nothing more than an opportunity to see firsthand how truly pompous, witless and moronic the members of the Judiciary Committee are. Joe Biden, as usual, talks like a gunsel in a thirties gangster movie, but puts up a fight like a moistened schoolgirl. Chuck Schumer yammers like the utter prick he is. Ted Kennedy sounds like a mixture of Barney Gumbel and Jabba the Hut. Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions show why some sort of IQ tests (not to mention psych evaluations) should be mandatory for congressional candidates, and Arlen Spectre is just creepy. Meanwhile, Roberts sits there, listens to the boozy wind gust off of the committee dais, and then proceeds, again and again, to sound brilliant, articulate and informed, while not saying a goddamn thing about what kind of judge he would be.

The few nuggets of potentially pertinent information Roberts has let slip so far are a mixed bag for those obsessed with the prospects of Roe v. Wade in a Roberts court. Roberts has made a lot of noise about his belief in stari decicis and the value of precedent in the law, which suggest that he might very well decline to overturn Roe, which has been reaffirmed by 38 subsequent S.C. decisions. But, of course, like almost every nominee, he just won't give any hint about how he would apply all of his high-minded judicial philosophies to the job of, you know, judging. So it's up in the air.

Still, if I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Roberts is NOT going to vote to overturn Roe, because Republican strategists like Karl Rove, who has publicly declared his goal of creating a generation of Republican hegemony in America, DON'T WANT ROE TO BE OVERTURNED! Abortion is the single most important engine for grass roots conservative political mobilization of the past thirty years. It's the unholy affront to decency that so many Christians see in legal abortion that has done more than any other issue to meld Christianity and the Republican party in the popular mind. The power of this issue is contingent on the perpetual outrage provoked by legal abortions, especially legal abortions decreed from the Supreme Court instead of through legislative means. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe, thereby returning the issue of abortion legality to the individual states, all of that righteous fury and mobilizing energy would be re-directed into state politics. Meanwhile, the mere majority of Americans who favor legal abortion but, having never really lived in danger of experiencing the alternative, are currently complacent about the issue, would become the new center of mass politics. The momentum, as it were, would switch to the pro-choice side. In politics it's easier to play offense than defense: defense holds the aforementioned danger of complacency. Meanwhile, when you challenge the status quo, not only are you harnessing a more aggrieved and therefore more energetic power base, but you don't really need immediate results to keep them happy. Power players like Rove, who dream of perpetual Republican dominance, require perpetual Republican outrage. Losing the abortion issue on the federal level would be the worst possible thing for their long-term plans. So, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they put up Roberts knowing he was a cautious, stari decisis Anthony Kennedy type and not a Scalia bombthrower, and trusted in the long-held practice of nominees not revealing their intentions to mask that fact from their base.

While the abortion issue is being chewed over by both sides, no one of course notices that Roberts is most definitely a pro-corporate, anti-labor judge who would have fit right in with the nineteenth century robber barons, handing out injunctions against striking workers with a stogy in one hand and a snifter of brandy in the other. And the game will continue: the high court failing to relieve the outrage of the Republican mass base while gratifying the wildest dreams of the real Republican base: that pesky upper 1 percent.