John Roberts

OP-ED COLUMNIST Rotan Lee again utilizes his million-dollar vocabulary to offer his opinion on the selection of John Roberts for the Supreme Court. But likening President Bush to Machiavelli was a bit much. Explain how deceit and cunning tactics were used when you yourself said Mr. Roberts has impeccable credentials? The president is doing just what a Democrat would do, except I find it hard to believe that they could find a better candidate than Mr. Roberts. It's refreshing that you have to go as far back as Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill to get to your point.

Because of his vote to uphold President Obama's Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts is suddenly being hailed for his independence from the conservative bloc he normally votes with on the Supreme Court. In its cover story this week, Time praises Roberts' decision as a "virtuoso performance" and likens him to King Solomon for having achieved a compromise among bitterly divided justices.   But a justice from another era puts Roberts in historical perspective. A University of Pennsylvania graduate who was a Philadelphia prosecutor and corporate lawyer before Herbert Hoover appointed him to the high court, Owen Roberts shared a last name but no family relationship with the current chief justice.

IF FINDING a new U.S. Supreme Court justice is going to turn into a bloody football game, John Roberts looks like he'll be a very slippery football. Because President Bush's nominee is a veteran lawyer but only a rookie judge - he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit only two years ago - little is really known about Roberts' judicial philosophy. Getting a handle on him won't be easy. That's why its appropriate for the U.S. Senate to drill deep and hard into Roberts' mind.

John Roberts floated some passes and fired others. Nearly all his throws arrived on the mark. And Roberts arrived with them. The Ridley senior quarterback completed 14 of 16 passes for 215 yards in leading the visiting Green Raiders to a 28-14 win over Penncrest in Saturday's game between Central League contenders. "I was pretty relaxed," said Roberts, a 5-foot-10, 157-pounder. "Their defense was good. We just went out and countered everything. " Ridley (4-2 overall, 4-1 league)

Glancing out at the sea of fans who will inevitably gather around the SPEED Channel stage this weekend at Dover International Speedway, John Roberts will keep one thought in mind. How lucky can a man get? Roberts is the host of a handful of NASCAR-themed shows that telecast seemingly nonstop from every venue visited by stock-car racing's top series, February through November. For a man who "hates" to travel, leaving his wife and three young children at home in Cornelius, N.C., each Thursday for a flight to the next destination, the grind can be particularly grueling.

IDON'T UNDERSTAND why Judge Roberts couldn't answer simple questions. I thought judges were supposed to make decisions and write opinions and then stand by them. If a judge can't face Congress - or the public - and say what he really thinks on ANY given issue, why should we trust him? Judge Roberts stonewalled or refused to answer more than 100 questions. This doesn't sound like a man who is unafraid to stand up and be counted for who he is. John Roberts is the wrong man for the job of chief justice.

Kenneth Carchidi (Letters, Aug. 1) apparently finds columnist Rotan Lee's arguments against John Roberts too abstract to deal with. I am disturbed by memos Roberts authored during his previous stints in the attorney general's office, which indicate a hostile view of civil rights enforcement, of environmental intervention by government agencies, and of the expansive New Deal view of the Commerce Clause. This sort of judicial primitivism does not show respect for "settled law" that characterized many of the initial stories on Roberts.

Bayard Henry Roberts, 96, of Bryn Mawr, an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad when it merged in 1968 with the New York Central to form the soon-to-be bankrupt Penn Central, died of pneumonia June 8 at Bryn Mawr Hospital. Born in Bala Cynwyd, Mr. Roberts lived a charmed life. In an oral history, Mr. Roberts described a childhood dancing class for 30 youngsters held at his parents' grand home - Snowden - in Bala Cynwyd. "We didn't learn to dance very much, but we did some terrible things," he said.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. "The Education of Henry Adams," 1907 When I began teaching at Temple in 1985, I was initially suspicious of John Roberts. He seemed too efficient, too neat to be a professor. He never looked rumpled and tweedy. His desk was always clean - never buried under crumbled and ungraded student papers or aging and undone lists of things to do. In academe, where minutiae so often expand to fill all the time and space available, Roberts seemed neither overwrought nor overwhelmed.

After just two days of monitoring a wiretap on a Philadelphia power broker's phone, FBI agent John Roberts knew he was working a huge case. He heard Ronald A. White, one of then-Mayor John F. Street's closest advisers, dictating to the city's treasurer which contractors should get work on a government financial deal - and which ones should be excluded. "Find something wrong," White ordered, telling the treasurer to dump an already-approved contractor and hire one who fit White's criteria for pay-to-play politics.

After just two days of monitoring a wiretap on a Philadelphia power broker's phone, FBI agent John Roberts knew he was working a huge case. He heard Ronald A. White, one of then-Mayor John F. Street's closest advisers, dictating to the city's treasurer which contractors should get work on a government financial deal - and which ones should be excluded. "Find something wrong," White ordered, telling the treasurer to dump an already-approved contractor and hire one who fit White's criteria for pay-to-play politics.

Because of his vote to uphold President Obama's Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts is suddenly being hailed for his independence from the conservative bloc he normally votes with on the Supreme Court. In its cover story this week, Time praises Roberts' decision as a "virtuoso performance" and likens him to King Solomon for having achieved a compromise among bitterly divided justices.   But a justice from another era puts Roberts in historical perspective. A University of Pennsylvania graduate who was a Philadelphia prosecutor and corporate lawyer before Herbert Hoover appointed him to the high court, Owen Roberts shared a last name but no family relationship with the current chief justice.

It's the judiciary's Nixon in China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against Obamacare while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.

In a precedent setting decision that likely will reverberate through election day and beyond, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision Thursday upheld President Obama's health care overhaul including a requirement that all non-exempt Americans buy health insurance. The court said the law's requirement that individual Americans purchase insurance or be subject to a penalty levied by the IRS was constitutional. It also upheld a provision greatly expanding Medicaid, the health care program for the poor jointly financed by the state and federal governments.

By Ilya Shapiro The Supreme Court's health-care ruling displayed an unfortunate convergence of two unholy strains of constitutional jurisprudence: liberal activism and conservative pacifism. Liberal activism, typified by the four Democratic-appointed justices, finds in the Constitution no judicially administrable limits on federal power. Conservative pacifism, a knee-jerk reaction to the liberal activism of the 1960s and '70s, argues that we must defer to Congress as much as possible, presuming its legislation to be constitutional.

WHEN Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices in an attempt to save his legacy, something extraordinary happened. A conservative justice by the name of Roberts swung to the left on a key decision, thereby preserving a crucial element of the New Deal.   Owen Roberts' vote was called the "switch in time that saved nine," the "nine" being the justices already firmly ensconced on the bench. FDR's unconstitutional plan failed. History has forgiven him this trespass, and so it could legitimately be said that Roberts, a Pennsylvania native, saved the president's hide.

John B. Roberts, 94, founder of the Temple University radio station, WRTI-FM, in 1953 and a teacher of communications at Temple from 1946 to 1988, died Thursday, March 8, of a spinal infection at his home in the retirement community of Rydal Park. Mr. Roberts was also the weekend news anchor at WFIL-TV (Channel 6) from 1952 to 1972, according to the website of Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia, which named him its person of the year in 1987. Paul Gluck, a former TV executive now on the Temple faculty, said Friday: "For people like me, who worked as practicing journalists and transitioned into the academic world, he is a near-perfect role model.

When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in 2005, many commentators predicted a "battle royale" over her replacement. For 10 years, O'Connor had been the swing vote in cases about abortion, affirmative action, states' rights, and nearly everything else. Republicans were determined to shift the court to the right, and Senate Democrats braced to resist them. But by nominating John Roberts to succeed O'Connor (and later to become chief justice), President George W. Bush smothered would-be critics with a candidate of impeccable merit.

A reverse-discrimination case involving Connecticut firefighters being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court today may show just how out of sync this court is with the nation's first African American president. Chief Justice John G. Roberts calls affirmative action the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race. " He prefers to declare the playing field level for everyone, while blithely turning a blind eye to vestiges of discrimination that perpetuate inequality. Racial bias is perhaps nowhere more evident than within some of this nation's municipal fire departments.

Glancing out at the sea of fans who will inevitably gather around the SPEED Channel stage this weekend at Dover International Speedway, John Roberts will keep one thought in mind. How lucky can a man get? Roberts is the host of a handful of NASCAR-themed shows that telecast seemingly nonstop from every venue visited by stock-car racing's top series, February through November. For a man who "hates" to travel, leaving his wife and three young children at home in Cornelius, N.C., each Thursday for a flight to the next destination, the grind can be particularly grueling.