July 23, 2005  "I'm glad we had Souter-phobia."  Fred Barnes
writes about "Souter-phobia" in the White House and how Bush's
key question to the five persons he interviewed was whether
they'd be the same 25 years from now. Roberts made the right
impression: he wasn't going to "grow in office." As Barnes tells
it, the Bush folks turned their Souter-detection machinery on
full blast: Bush advisers studied how the nomination of Souter
came about. It wasn't that Souter, who'd served on the New
Hampshire Supreme Court and, briefly, as a federal appeals court
judge, misled his interrogators on the staff of the elder Bush.
The problem was that the White House "didn't ask, 'Are you a
conservative, why, or when did you become one?'" an aide to the
current president says. "They didn't ask any of those
questions." Those questions were asked of Roberts. "I'm glad we
had Souter-phobia. If we hadn't asked these questions about
judicial philosophy and the view of the court's role, the
nominee wouldn't have been John Roberts.