In November, 2006, Chief Justice John Roberts talked with an ABC News Nightline reporter on a wide variety of topics related to Roberts' nomination and experience on the Supreme Court to date. At one point, the subject turned to the role of judges. Perhaps the interviewer's question was a set-up because the Chief Justice's views are widely known on this, but Roberts' response succinctly summarizes why judges need to exercise restraint when deciding cases. Here's the excerpt:
REPORTER: Now during your hearings, you said that you didn't think courts should solve all of society's problems, that they should have a more restrained view. Why not? You've got these smart people, you're up there on the bench and some of these are really hard questions.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, you know, it gets back to something I mentioned earlier about last week when we voted. Think back to the framers who drafted the Constitution. These were people who literally risked everything to gain the right to govern themselves, certainly risked all their material well-being and risked their lives in the struggle for independence.
And the thought that the first thing they would do when they got around to drafting a Constitution would be to say, 'Let's take all the hard issues in our society and let's turn them over to nine unelected people who aren't politically accountable and let them decide,' that would have been the farthest thing from their mind.
I have enormous respect for the authority carried by the people across the street in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people have voted for them and put their confidence in their judgment.
Not a single person has voted for me and if we don't like what the people in Congress do, we can get rid of them, and if you don't like what I do, it's kind of too bad. And that is, to me, an important constraint. It means that I'm not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences.
The only reason I'm protected from those political pressures is because I'm supposed to make a decision based on the law. And so I don't think it would be a good idea to turn all the hard issues over to the courts. Those hard issues belong in Congress, they belong in the Executive Branch.
The courts have the responsibility to make sure both of those branches abide by the legal limits in the Constitution, but that's it.
The Chief Justice's remarks and the application of his judicial philosophy exemplify the type of judge that conservatives want to see appointed to the federal bench. Unfortunately, judges like Roberts are ultimately branded as "right-wing extremists" by liberals who want judges to broaden, not limit, the scope of their decision-making by creating "rights" where none exist, in order to advance an elitist view of society that bypasses the will of the people. Although many liberal judges pay lip service to the philosophy of restraint espoused by the Chief Justice, few live by it.
