Roberts Hearings
Base10 is ashamed to admit that he is not following the Roberts hearings that closely. By all media accounts, they are fairly tame. It doesn't look like there's really a question about whether he will be approved, just a question about when. What concerns Base10 as a conservative is whether he is the "stealth candidate" that he is portrayed to be.

I don't know. It just doesn't hold my interest anymore. I remember the Bork hearings. I remember Souter and Kennedy and Ginsberg. I remember watching the hearings and consulting my first year conlaw textbooks for references to obscure cases. It was almost interactive. Now, what's the point unless some smoking gun shows up in his backround? But I don't think that Roberts is going to turn into a Bernie Kerik.

Base10 was at Borders the other day and came across this book by Cass Sunstein, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America. In the book he argues that "radical" conservative judges are wrong for the court while judges who support "incremental" change are better. Now I don't want to review a book that I haven't read based wholly on the title and the cover blurb and frankly no one can criticise Sunstein's scholarship. But you have to ask yourself, when was the last time he felt compelled to critique the radical liberal judges of the Warren era? Where their wholesale changes to constitutional jurisprudence acceptable while wholesale conservative changes not? After all, wholesale conservative changes to the constitution would, for the most part, throw the most controversial socail issues back to the state and federal legislatures--the very spot where they belonged before the fateful day that Earl Warren became Chief Justice.

I'm reminded of the cover blurb for Sunstein's other book, Free Markets and Social Justice. The writer (of the blurb) claimed that Sunstein had demolished the idea that free markets were the most efficient way to allocate societal resources. Demolished? What of Keynes and Coase? What of Alfred Marshall and Friedrich von Hayek? All of the mathematically rigorous work that they have done laying the foundations of modern economics is for naught?
- posted by Base10 @ 4:22 PM