Whatever you think of Roberts — and I, personally, have warmed to him over time, whatever my seemingly unbridgeable differences with his conservative politics and anti-judiciary biases — there’s absolutely no need to turn his confirmation battle into a slur campaign. Yet that is precisely what the irrepressibly left-wing MoveOn.org is set to do, and in a particularly tasteless way:
The televised images of poverty-stricken evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are part of a provocative, last-minute effort by a liberal interest group to divert federal Judge John Roberts’ path to confirmation as chief justice.
MoveOn.org Political Action plans to unveil a TV ad on Monday that questions whether Roberts is sensitive enough to civil rights concerns to lead the Supreme Court. The ad suggests that the plight of the mostly African-American evacuees in New Orleans showed that poverty remains a serious problem among minorities, said Ben Brandzel, the group’s advocacy director. In a mix of judicial and racial politics, the ad then suggests that minorities could suffer if the Senate confirms Roberts.
“The connection is obvious,” Brandzel said. “The images after Hurricane Katrina show we still live in a society where significant racial inequities exist. We believe John Roberts’ record on civil rights … is clearly not the direction our country needs to head now.”
Should we be surprised that Katrina and her victims are already being exploited for political gain? No, perhaps not.
But this attempt to link Roberts’s record on affirmative action and civil rights to the black underclass in New Orleans is simply repulsive. Roberts’s record does seem to be quite conservative with respect to affirmative action and civil rights, but how does his judicial color-blindness relate to the plight of Katrina’s victims? Has, say, opposition to race-based college admissions preferences somehow caused New Orleans’s poverty? That must be the message here, but it’s an insult to Roberts and to everyone else who advocates color-blind politics, that is, to everyone who has tried to rise above race and to view human beings as human beings. It’s also an insult to the non-black poor in, say, Mississippi, also Katrina’s victims.
MoveOn’s campaign isn’t just a stretch, it’s desperation. If you object to Roberts’s judicial color-blindless and/or otherwise object to his nomination, fine, but challenge him on those issues, on his writings and his record, not by using the victims of a horrible tragedy in a slur campaign of attack ads.