August 08, 2005

First Anti-Roberts Ad Airs Tuesday

Tomorrow begins the air war in the Judge Roberts nomination battle. NARAL Pro-Choice America will be lauching a $500,000 ad buy in Rhode Island and Maine to highlight some work Roberts did as a lawyer in the Solicitor General's office when President George H.W. Bush was President. The ad involves Bray vs. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic. NOW and pro-abortion groups wanted to use the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871 against pro-life protesters that included radical and violent elements like the counter-productive Operation: Rescue. In a conference call today Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center said Roberts' amicus brief supported the argument that "under established precedent" the federal statute didn't apply. Before the court Roberts said [PDF], "The United States appears in this case not to defend petitioners' tortious conduct, but to defend the proper interpretation" of the Klu Klux Klan Act. He went on to say,

Petitioners do not interfere with respondents' rights because respondents are women. Petitioners do what they do because they're opposed to an activity, the activity of abortion. They target their conspirators not because of who they are, but because of what they are doing.

...

Petitioners are opposed to abortion, not women, even though only women can exercise the right to an abortion.

A bombshell this isn't. Nor is this some wild legal concoction. The reasoning wasn't ideological; it was determining the proper bounds of a federal law.

In their ad NARAL contends Roberts' work means he turned a blind eye from violence at abortion clinics. To hammer that message home the ad stars Emily Lyons a victim of a clinic bombing who had endured "more than 20 surgeries for the injuries she sustained." But NARAL is very misleading. The Bray case dealt with a clinic in Virginia. Lyons was injured Birmingham, Alabama. The culprit was Eric Rudolph. This is a bait-and-switch to rile up abortion supporters and scare Democratic Senators into forcefully opposing Roberts. Jennifer Braceras, member, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights thought Lyons part in the ad was "totally inappropriate." She later added that it was "unfortunate we can't have a more intellectual debate of the role of the court in our society." But when the nominee is as nebulous as Roberts and interest groups have money to burn this is what we get.