Why Elections Matter: Chief Justice Robert's New Yorker Profile

kos over at Daily Kos highlights this key graf from Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Chief Justice John Roberts in the latest New Yorker

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Thanks, John Kerry! But if we didn't have Bush's second term we probably wouldn't have Obama's first term and Democratic control of the US House and Senate.

But this also highlights why Obam's choice to replace Justice David Souter is so important.