Salon.com News | What does John Roberts believe?: "But closer examination suggests that the president may be playing by yesterday's rules, in which mere qualification and demeanor might have been sufficient. President Bush has made ideology a critical basis for selection of his judicial nominees, and Democrats in the Senate have responded in kind. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, in particular, has argued in the context of lower-court nominations that the Senate need not and ought not to confirm judges who refuse to divulge their own views about the meaning of the Constitution. And already he and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who, like Schumer, sits on the Judiciary Committee, have said that they have an obligation to find out what Judge Roberts thinks about the most important constitutional questions, including the scope of the constitutional right to privacy, which the Supreme Court has held protects a woman's right to choose abortion but which justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas reject.

The importance of such questions in this case almost couldn't be greater. For if Roberts turns out to be what the president has promised to appoint (and what many people on both ends of the ideological spectrum seem to suspect), a conservative with substantive views in the mold of Justices Scalia and Thomas, his appointment would be a seismic event in American law and the life of our country."

(Via Salon.)