Add The Claremont Institute to the list of Robert's skeptics

Three excellent posts from The Claremont Institute's blog, Local Liberty, explain and summarize why John Robert's nomination is a disappointment. Please read Dennis' comment as well. An excerpt from the first post indicates why Harry Ried is a complete jerk:

"For all of Judge Roberts’ fine qualities, we conservatives must not settle for less than Clarence Thomas-level jurisprudence."

Here it is, The Claremont Institute, a highly influential academic think tank praising the jurisprudence not of Scalia, but of Thomas. And they are right. It is amazing what a secret it is that Thomas is actually the one most pulling the Supreme Court back to originalism, not Scalia. In light of Thomas' clear written record, only a racist can conclude that he is merely Scalia's lacky, which is how Thomas' jurisprudence is taught in law schools today. Harry Reid is a racist.

A longer excerpt from one post by Richard Reeb:

"Doubtless Judge John Roberts is a good man, else President George W. Bush would not have nominated him to serve as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court yesterday. Doubtless, too, he is not only better than someone a liberal Democrat would nominate but maybe even better than Sandra Day O'Connor. Of course, this is not saying much, since the Court and the nation need much more than a loyal Republican or a well-meaning conservative. We have been down this road before wherein a Republican President assured himself that his nominee would interpret the law, not make it up; follow the text of the Constitution, rather than some "evolving" doctrine; decide the case only and not legislate from the bench; and even follow the intent of the Framers of the Constitution. These are, at best, but necessary conditions for good jurisprudence and hardly sufficient. Earl Warren, William Brennan, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter have all been major disappointments, yet they were all nominated by Republican Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush.

The judicial mantra recited above will not do; we must know whether the nominee understands that the Constitution was intended to establish a republican government dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. However brilliant William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia have been they lack the understanding that animated the founders of our constitutional order. They know the contours and uses of the constitutional structure, but they do not know what it is for beyond what the people have authorized in the constitutional text. They do not know, in other words, that the legal positivism of the Oliver Wendell Holmes school is wholly inadequate for recapturing the natural rights political philosophy that informs both the American Revolution and the American Constitution."