Sobran on Roberts and that pesky baseball metaphor.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)

The following is well reasoned, as per Mr. Sobran's usual. But again, I wanted more from Roberts. Not declarations of horror over Roe V. Wade, but some concrete proof he is what Sobran (and Bush) THINK he is. (And this goes double for Miers.)

Sinking to the occasion, California’s Dianne Feinstein explained to Judge John Roberts why she wasn’t happy with his answer to one of her questions: “I’m trying to see your feelings as a man. I’m not asking you for a legal view.”

Right on! Who cares about Roberts’s legal reasoning, for Pete’s sake? This is twenty-first century America! We want to know about his feelings!

Does he have the right feelings? How does he feel about abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, and stuff like that? Does he feel the way we do, or does he feel the way our enemies do? Does he appreciate how women and minorities feel? (The first article of the liberal creed is: “Women and minorities never have a nice day.”)

Much of the commentary on Roberts’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court has assumed that he may be cagily concealing his real feelings until he is confirmed, whereupon he will be free to implement those feelings in his judicial rulings, rolling back a century of liberal ... er, “progress.” Senator Ted Kennedy, another who unfailingly sinks to the occasion, has discerned those feelings in Roberts’s previous decisions as a Federal judge, and finds them “mean-spirited.”

To be sure, Roberts’s views on the law tend to lack the lyrical note. He has the trained lawyer’s habit of answering the question he is asked, without histrionic amplification. He can entertain different sides of a controversy without indignation at those who may hold them.

To emotional people who demand that the law cough up the results they want, this seems inhuman. They shout, and they wonder uneasily why he doesn’t shout back. Where are his feelings? He must be hiding them, and they must be shameful.

Modern American politics is about feelings, but Roberts, as he says, isn’t a politician. In his own apt metaphor, he’s an umpire, not a player. He addresses the questions put to him — scrupulously, surgically, by the book. Nobody comes to the game to see the umpire, and nobody asks the umpire how he “feels” about calling a struggling hitter out on strikes. (“Have you no sense of the pathos of the situation, ump? The kid may be sent down to the minors!”)

Some of Roberts’s answers are open to criticism. I suspect he gives too much weight to precedent. But even this is at least a sign of prudence, not the judicial arrogance we’ve seen too much of lately.