On Tuesday night, President Bush announced that John Roberts, 50, would be his Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. 'Situation’ host Tucker Carlson sat down with NBC News Chief Legal Correspondent and ‘Abrams Report,’ Host Dan Abrams, to discuss the nomination.
To read an excerpt of their conversation, continue to the text below, to watch the video click on the “Launch” button to the right.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: What do you make of this, Dan?
DAN ABRAMS, NBC CHIEF LEGAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, this was the right choice, so to speak, in the sense that he's just conservative enough, I think, to satisfy the base. And yet, there's not enough on paper for the liberal groups to really get him.
And so, I think that he's going to drive some of these interest groups crazy, though, because they want to go after the president's choice. And, yet, some of the left-wing groups are going to have to say, ‘boy, what are we going to be able to find here?’
CARLSON: If you go through the Web sites -- and they have spent months preparing for this moment, and there's not a lot.
What do you make, though, on most of the liberal Web sites (reprinting) something he wrote about Roe vs. Wade and the right to abortion not being found in the Constitution. Does that reflect his thinking?
ABRAMS: Well, that was when he was working for the solicitor general. The solicitor general is effectively the attorney for the president. He was working for Ken Starr. Ken Starr was the attorney for the president at the time. And that was the position of the administration. He was signed on to that brief.
Yes, those were words that he had probably written. But, you know, he's an advocate. He's a lawyer. And when he was up for confirmation as a Federal Court of Appeals judge, he was asked that very question. And he said, I was an advocate. He's not going to give the sort of specific answers that I think some on the left would like to see. He's just not going to provide them with the fodder I think they need.
CARLSON: So, what do we know about what he as a person thinks? I mean, are there any insights into his personal judicial philosophy?
ABRAMS: You know, we know a little bit. We've seen opinions that he's written for the past couple of years. But, even on criminal law issues, they haven't been uniformly conservative. I was reading up on one case where a criminal defendant was convicted of fraud. And he joined with an unlikely alliance in that case, which wouldn't be the ordinary case. I mean, he took on someone else who'd been appointed by Bush. So, you don't have someone who, I think, has a lot of material to work with.
CARLSON: Well, so how do you work with it? I mean, if you're NARAL or People For the American Way, how do you try to derail this guy?
ABRAMS: You look at his nanny. You look at whether he smoked pot. You go back...
CARLSON: Yes, hire a private detective, basically.
ABRAMS: I mean, it's all I can think of. … Sure. They're going to go through the opinions. They're going to go through his positions in the various cases. His position again and again in front of the Judiciary Committee will be, ‘I was an advocate.’
He did it before. I mean, we have got it right here. Senator Hatch asked him: “As a lawyer in the solicitor general's office, you were duty-bound to represent the official position of the United States, even if it is conflicted with your own personal beliefs, right?”
“Certainly.”
That's what they're going to get from him.
CARLSON: All right.
ABRAMS: That's what they're going to get from him.
CARLSON: I just said what they told me to say.
ABRAMS: And so, they are not going to get anything substantive. His opinions that they have down on paper aren't going to be particularly useful. Sure, he's donated some money to Republicans.
CARLSON: So, it's either going to be just a clean sweep for him, essentially -- he'll get 70 votes in the Senate -- or it's going to be incredibly ugly, like it was for Clarence Thomas?
ABRAMS: Right. Right. I think they're going to have to find something beyond his legal philosophy.
