First You Need to Persuade the President
In a Washington Times op-ed piece, Bruce Fein urges President Bush to use the Roberts nomination as an opportunity "to persuade the public that the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning as mandated by the rule of law and separation of powers, not to achieve particular results." But Fein's subsequent examples of Republican infidelity to this principle suggest that the president is an unlikely defender of the Constitution:
The advocacy task is difficult…because process commands no impassioned and well-funded supporters. In contrast, the opponents of process obsessed with results–whether liberals or conservatives–are organized and vocal. Thus, liberals would manipulate the Commerce Clause to enact federal laws banning guns in schools or transforming state crimes against women into federal cases. Conservatives are equally eager for Congress to brandish the Clause to prohibit partial birth abortions or to thwart Oregon's Death With Dignity Act, or to act without a crumb of constitutional power to disturb a final Florida state court judgment concerning Terri Schiavo's vegetative state. Whereas liberals rejoiced at the Supreme Court's invocation of the "mysteries of the universe" and the "moral fact that one belongs to oneself and not to another or to society" to proclaim rights to an abortion and homosexual sodomy, conservatives similarly crave to wield corresponding fatuousness to promulgate an embryo's constitutional right to birth and a constitutional prohibition against suicide or assisted suicide.