Supreme Conflict by Jan Crawford Greenburg

Author:Jan Crawford Greenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

8.

THE NATURAL

About a month after a dying Rehnquist swore in President Bush to a second term, David Leitch, one of Bush’s senior advisers, packed up his office in the West Wing. Leitch had worked two years as the deputy White House counsel, and he was heading off to the more lucrative private sector to be the general counsel at Ford Motor Company. But before he left the White House for good, Leitch needed one more meeting with Karl Rove. He wanted to share his insight on possible candidates to replace Rehnquist when he retired, as most expected, in June.

Leitch was uniquely positioned to give Rove authoritative advice. He had worked with all of the top contenders and knew them personally. He’d clerked for federal appeals court judge J. Harvie Wilkinson after law school. He’d gone on to work in the Justice Department for J. Michael Luttig, and he later became law partners with John G. Roberts in the Washington-based firm of Hogan & Hartson. For the past two years, Leitch had worked directly with White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. He also understood what the job of chief justice entailed. Leitch had clerked for Rehnquist on the Supreme Court just a few years after Roberts did.

Leitch sent Rove an e-mail in late February, asking for a meeting to talk about the Supreme Court. Several days later, on Leitch’s last day in the White House, the two sat down together for breakfast. Rove listened intently as Leitch went through the possible nominees. Leitch said they all had their strengths, even Gonzales, whom conservatives vociferously opposed. “They’re all great,” Leitch emphasized to Rove.

But one stood out. Roberts.

“If the president picks Roberts, you can sell him as the nominee who was selected purely on the merits—the quality candidate,” Leitch told Rove. “He’s the best Supreme Court advocate of his generation. Democrats can’t attack him. Enough Republicans know him, and know he’s not David Souter. He’s going to be reliable. People will love him. The president will love him.”

Rove did not disagree. John Roberts was widely considered one of the top lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court, an assessment shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as by liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An honors graduate of Harvard Law School, he’d come to Washington in 1980 to clerk for then–associate justice William Rehnquist. He stayed to work as a lawyer in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. As deputy solicitor general for the elder Bush, Roberts represented the administration’s position in the Supreme Court. He was poised to become a judge in 1992, when Bush nominated him to the D.C.-based federal appeals court. But Roberts’s nomination, coming at the end of Bush’s term, languished in the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee and died when Bill Clinton was elected. With a Democrat in the White House, Roberts left government service and moved to Hogan & Hartson, where he quickly became one of the nation’s top appellate lawyers and was regularly called upon to argue before the Supreme Court.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.