As the Hearings Proceed...

It is both inescapable and challenging: publishing a few days before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts begin, what can be said that won't run the risk of being hopelessly outdated, largely irrelevant, or flat-out wrong? Let me offer a few observations which I hope will avoid these pitfalls before briefly addressing two other subjects.

In the story about Judge Roberts that appears on page one, I end by quoting an all-purpose attack launched by Barry Lynn, appearing on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Because Judge Roberts is scary bright, squeaky clean, and shows no signs of being anything other than an exemplary Supreme Court justice, the Rev. Lynn was reducing to offering vague, almost entirely content-free charges.

I was instantly reminded of those heretofore undetected "penumbras" and "emanations" that Justice William Douglas's fertile imagination found in the interstices of the Constitution and which Justice Harry Blackmun later drafted into the service of his campaign to find an equally indiscernible "right" to abortion.

If, like me, you haven't a clue what these terms mean, let me quote author Mark Levin's explanation: "A penumbra is an astronomical term describing the partial shadow in an eclipse or the edge of a sunspotand it is another way to describe something unclear or uncertain. 'Emanation' is a scientific term for gas made from radioactive decayit also means 'an emission.'"

A movement comfortable with resting its case on wholly imaginary legal footing is not about to worry about intellectual rigor or accuracy, let alone fairness. Don't be surprised if the hearings get very, very testy.

As I re-read Lynn's charges, it brought to mind the now-ancient debate over what were called MIRVsMultiple Independently-launched Re-entry Vehicles. Each of these missiles could carry a large number of independently targeted warheads.

I suspect that's what will happen when the verbal silos are open and one by one the hyper-pro-abortionists on the Senate Judiciary CommitteeSchumer, Durbin, Biden, et al.are launched. I suspect that by the time Sen. Kennedy gets through caricaturing Judge Roberts, not even Roberts' own mother will recognize him.