America the Principled by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Author:Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307405647
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2007-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Ideology, Competence, and Contradictions: John Roberts’s Confirmation

Politicians who play loose with the facts sometimes get trapped by their own words, but meanwhile, irresponsible statements chip away at trust and respect. A case in point involves a coincidence of events around the time John Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court. Periodically, some politicos have tried to undermine the court’s integrity (contempt for court?) by trying to nominate unqualified people who supported their agendas. (“Even the mediocre deserve representation on the court” was Senator Roman Hruska’s refrain accompanying President Richard Nixon’s failed nomination of Harold Carswell in 1970.) The eminently qualified Roberts followed inexperienced Harriet Miers, but meanwhile a member of the president’s party was lashing out against the same institutions that helped make Roberts so qualified.

Chief Justice Roberts might not even have known about his lucky escape from attack by partisan pit bulls when President Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court. The growling could have begun when a member of the president’s party, then–U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), focused on what could have been Roberts’s background flaw—that Roberts spent his formative years getting educated in BOSTON. At HARVARD!

Boston, Santorum said, was responsible for abusive pedophile priests in the Catholic Church. “While it is no excuse for this scandal,” he wrote in Catholic Online in 2002, “it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.” Despite the fact that cases of child abuse committed by priests were found in Louisiana, Ireland, Latin America, and elsewhere, Santorum continued to blame Boston for tainting people. Just a few weeks before Roberts’s nomination, Santorum refused to back off. His aide Robert Traynham explained, “It’s an open secret that you have Harvard University and MIT that tend to tilt to the left in terms of academic biases. I think that’s what the Senator was speaking to.”

Those comments bring us back to Roberts, who is as Harvard as you can get (Harvard College 1976, Harvard Law School 1979). Seven years as an impressionable youth being molded in the Boston crucible! See the taint? In a photo with other Harvard Law Review editors, the young John had—gasp—long hair. Does that mean that Santorum should have led a charge against Roberts’s confirmation? If he wanted to be consistent, he would have. After all, isn’t consistency a Republican virtue and “waffling” the label some party members pin on Democratic opponents?

Though it would have been fun to see Santorum squirm in the confirmation hearings, consistency is not all it is cracked up to be. With Roberts ensconced on the Supreme Court a few years later, it is not too late for Santorum to apologize to Boston and tout the virtues of a Harvard education. Learning from experience and changing one’s mind is a characteristic of great leaders, and an honorable American tradition. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in his essay “Self-Reliance.” Similarly, Walt Whitman, poet of American

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