WASHINGTON — Judge John G. Roberts Jr. may confront an unexpected opponent this week during the hearings on his nomination as chief justice of the United States -- Hurricane Katrina.
Although Roberts is expected to win confirmation, critics have begun to voice a new criticism of President Bush's nominee after the storm that demolished parts of the Gulf Coast.
The line of attack was first sounded Friday by the Democratic National Committee's outspoken chairman, Howard Dean, and reinforced Sunday by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the only African American member of the Senate.
Speaking about the black residents of New Orleans, who were the storm's most visible victims, Dean said that Roberts' "entire legal career appears to be about making sure those folks don't have the same rights everybody else does."
"That's probably not the right thing to do," Dean continued, "two weeks after a disaster where certain members of society clearly did not have the same protections that everybody else did because of their circumstances.... I know Judge Roberts loves the law. I'm not sure he loves the American people."
Obama, appearing on ABC's "This Week," picked up the same head-and-heart theme: "I think what we do need to ask ourselves is whether he has the heart, the breadth of perspective and the recognition that historically the role of the court has been to look out not just for the powerful but also the powerless.
"I think that Katrina does indicate that we've got a lot of problems in our midst ... in terms of poverty, in terms of the differences in life opportunities for blacks, whites, Hispanics," Obama said. "That has to inform how we think about every branch of government and their functions, and I think that the Supreme Court is no different."
Obama, like Roberts, is a magna cum laude Harvard Law School graduate and a former top editor of the Harvard Law Review. He said Roberts had not appeared to take racial issues seriously in his judicial thinking.
"There is an underlying concern that a judicial philosophy that ignores the possibilities of racial discrimination or gender discrimination, a political philosophy that typically errs on the side of the powerful, rather than the powerless, that's a judicial philosophy that can ... exacerbate some of the problems that we have in this country," Obama said.
