RITES.(The Talk of the Town)(Supreme Court elections)

Jeffrey Toobin talks about the future of the Supreme Court

Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court's next big battle

The week after Labor Day was grim for almost everyone in official Washington. Hurricane Katrina turned swiftly from epic tragedy to political farce--just another partisan quarrel, Social Security reform in hip waders. President Bush and his critics traded talking points, to the advantage of neither, and even this most self-important city seemed to recognize the smallness of its discourse. What would normally have been a momentous event, the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, was eclipsed by the debate about the Gulf; the only thing that seemed to cut through the blather in the capital, and just barely, was the nomination of John Roberts as Rehnquist's replacement.

It's a rare, if not unprecedented, thing to see Supreme Court Justices assembled on the famous marble steps of their building. (In reality, tourists use the steps; the Justices drive into an underground entrance at the back, and many lawyers use a side door on Maryland Avenue.) But in Tuesday's brilliant sunshine six of the eight surviving Justices lined up at the top of the stairs to greet the casket of the Chief Justice, who had died the previous Saturday night. Still, it wasn't the coffin or the Justices that drew the attention of the television cameras but, rather, the second pallbearer on the left, Roberts.

In less than two months, Roberts has gone from obscure jurist to putative savior of the increasingly embattled Bush Presidency. So confident was the President that his choice of Roberts as Chief Justice would be well received that he announced his decision at 8 a.m. on Labor Day, instead of waiting for a more customary time to break news. The President's confidence appeared to be justified, because a nimbus of deference surrounded Roberts all week, even when it came to pallbearing duties. "John was the only one who had done it before," a former Rehnquist law clerk said. "He said it was harder than it looked."

Indeed, several of the other former law clerks appeared weary, almost panicked, as they struggled up the forty-four marble steps to the Great Hall. (Kerri Martin Bartlett, a 1983 clerk and a former federal prosecutor in New York, held her corner of the pine casket with both hands and looked as though she might topple under the strain.) Roberts's unlined countenance didn't crack, though if he had glanced toward his future colleagues he might have sensed the possibility of difficulties ahead. Two Justices were missing. One of them, Anthony M. Kennedy, had an understandable ...