NY Daily News - "Passing the Torch" - John Roberts to Succeed Chief Justice Rehnquist

September 7, 2005
By JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - Any doubts John Roberts was a shoo-in to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist were put to rest yesterday when he helped carry his mentor's coffin into the Supreme Court to lie in repose.
Political observers agreed the somber moment amounted to a public anointment of Roberts, who once clerked for Rehnquist, as he and the other pallbearers lifted the flag-draped coffin up the steps past the high court's eight misty-eyed living justices.

"It was the passing of the torch," said a top aide to a liberal Senate Democrat, who predicted Roberts is as good as sworn in despite confirmation hearings beginning Monday. "There are moments that are genuine and this was one of them."

Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - whose July retirement announcement prompted President Bush to nominate Roberts for her swing seat on the divided panel - dabbed at her eyes with a white lace handkerchief as the body of her Stanford Law School colleague passed by.

Bush elevated Roberts' nomination after the chief justice's death Saturday.

The other justices - notably Antonin Scalia, passed over by Bush when he picked the recently minted federal judge to be the nation's top jurist - watched somberly as their likely next boss strode past them into the court's Great Hall.

Both Democrat and Republican sources on Capitol Hill said Roberts should easily coast to confirmation and assume fellow conservative Rehnquist's role, as he would have when Bush tapped him to succeed O'Connor, whose vote is never certain to swing right or left.

One legal expert said it's an unanswered question whether Roberts can conquer one of the most activist courts in American history, which has made a habit of ruling laws passed by Congress unconstitutional, as effortlessly as he has the Senate.

"He's junior in service and junior in age to the other justices," said University of Richmond law Prof. Carl Tobias, who noted the least-experienced justice, Stephen Breyer, has been on the bench 11 years.

"I don't think they're going to be tamed by Roberts," Tobias said. "They're eight scorpions in the bottle."

But another expert said Roberts will easily fill Rehnquist's shoes as chief administrator of all U.S. courts, a power that includes deciding who writes the opinion when he's in the majority or the dissent.

The 50-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer has argued 39 cases before the notoriously finicky Supremes and has passed muster magnificently, said one member of the elite Supreme Court bar.

"Many of the justices consider him to be one of the best [Supreme Court lawyers] in the country," said conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice. "I consider him the best, and I argue cases there."