In any instance, you write:
“Judge Roberts not only should not be confirmed as a Justice to the Supreme Court, but should not be confirmed as Chief Justice.”

Do you believe that, should the Roberts nomination be somehow defeated by the Senate, President Bush will nominate Lawrence Tribe or Jack Balkin for the Supreme Court? Do you envision the elevation of Justice Ginsburg to the Chief Justiceship?

I hate to seem excessively glib, but who is it that, realistically, you want President Bush to nominate? Is there anyone that a conservative Republican President could nominate, and a Republican Senate would confirm, who would be any more palatable to you than John Roberts? And if not, what exactly is it you think will come of defeating Roberts’ nomination? Perhaps the reason that nobody on the Hill “is talking about this” is because they are too busy breathing a sigh of relief that they got so moderate a nominee compared to what they expected?

It seems to me that the people who should be most leary of Roberts are those who voted for President Bush based primarily on his promise to appoint more Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, a promise he has, by all available evidence of Roberts’ views, singularly failed to deliver. A conservative, perhaps – but no originalist.

Incidentally, I wasn’t aware that there was any significant evidence that Jefferson was autistic, beyond that which was offered in a roundly-pilloried book a few years ago. I’m not saying he certainly wasn’t, but you present it here as a statement of undisputed fact, something singularly unjustified by the facts and scholarship to hand.

During 1993, I was involved in a California State Court case in which I was a victim of domestic violence (and injured because of it), and needed necessary reasonable accommodations under the Americans With Disabilities Act to enable me to fully and equally participate in access to the Court. At stake were my fundamental constitutional rights to parent my own child, in a grandparent visitation of the type in which we now know numerous Courts have struck down States’ grandparent visitation statutes as unconstitutional.

The California Court refused to comply with the reasonable accommodations civil rights mandates of Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act and refused to protect me from violenc against women.

Instead, the State Court forced the accommodation burden (both performing the accommodation tasks and paying for it) on my mother, Claire A. Day, who was the other grandparent and had her own mental disability requiring accommodation conrary to the command of Title II of the ADA. My mother was not trained in accommodating an autistic, was unable to withstand the burden of performing the accommodation(as a scribe) and paying for it as well, and, finally, at the end of her rope in an act of desperate frustration, committed suicide by self-immolation in a public Equal Protection and violence against women protest.

During 1993 under the tenure of Judge Roberts at the Department of Justice, I wrote to the DOJ complaining about violations of my Americans With Disabilities Act rights and rights respecting violence against women and asked for the DOJ to help me enforce my rights against the California Court under the Americans With DIsabilities Act, pleading that the disability violations were making my mother suicidal. There are many accounts of autistics’ parents and caretakers committing suicide because the burdens placed on them are too many.

The DOJ refused to help me enforce my rights during 1993, my mother thereafter suicided during 1994, and between 1989-1993, at the time the DOJ regulations at 28 CFR pt 35 were being drafted and promugated, during Judge Robert’s tenure at DOJ, glaringly omitted from the regulations were any requirements that autistic, learning, and cervically disabled (or quadraplegics) be provided oral-spoken methods of making (communicating) DOJ discirmination complaints and to require public entities reasonably accommdoate this class of disabled by providing oral-spoken (not written) formats for communication.

What I am trying to say here, is during Judge Roberts tenure at DOJ, policies of deliberate exclusion against this class of the disabled were approved, and I have no doubt that but for the anti-violence against women/anti-civil rights/anti-disability philosophies and policies in which Judge Roberts participated in formulating at DOJ from 1989-1993 the horrendous fire-burning death of my mother would have been prevented through vigorous DOJ Title II Americans With Disabilities Act enforcement of the fundamental right to reasonable accommodations access against the noncompliant California Court.

Moreover, this class of autistics are some of the very developmentally disabled who were dumped out of institutions by the Reagan era policies without a proper safety net, and who are now the primary victims of Bush administration “conservative compassion” policies to: cut Social Security disability benefits, cut medical care, expand non-dischargeability in bankruptcy of student loans these disabled have undertaken to access employment opportunities, restrict EEOC Title I ADA enforcement against employers who refuse to provide accommodations to enable the employability of this class, cuts to assistive technology funding to enable this class faciulitated communication devices, cut sufficient readily available affordable housing; etc. It would appear that what is going on here with this class of disabled is no different than the Bush “let them all die” response to New Orleans African Americans in Hurricane Katrina.

Even Thomas Jefferson was an autistic, a lawyer, and a founding father, so these policies of anti-disability civil rights due to lack of disability civil rights enforcement policy promoted by Judge Robert’s DOJ tenure for this class of disabled makes no sense and is antithetical to every quality Americans should be seeking in a Supreme Court Justice.

Why isn’t anyone talking about this, and the missing files from this 1989-1993 DOJ period of vetting Judge Roberts for the Supreme Court — and now Chief Justice?

Doesn’t this then mean, logically, that even though Roberts is being named “Chief” as well as a “Justice,” he is not necessarily “replacing Rehnquist”? Instead, he could be viewed as “replacing O’Connor and at the same time being named Chief.”