James M. Talent: “I did not want my eloquence to outstrip the time I had available, Mr. President, so thank you for that. We have heard a…”

“I did not want my eloquence to outstrip the time I had available, Mr. President, so thank you for that. We have heard a lot from Judge Roberts himself, and maybe it is good for me to close by quoting some of what he has said about the judicial function. I thought he did an excellent job of explaining to people what the judicial role is. Of course, to explain something clearly you have to, to some extent, oversimplify it, and he admitted the times he was doing that. He talked about the judge being the umpire, and somebody else basically writes the rules. The judge is the umpire. Believe me, that gives plenty of discretion and authority to the judge to develop the law in one direction or another but to develop it within the constraints of an objective rule of law. Judge Roberts said about this: If the people who framed our Constitution were jealous of their freedom and liberty, they would not have sat around and said, ``Let's take all the hard issues and give them over to the judges.'' That would have been the farthest thing from their mind. Now judges have to decide hard questions when they come up in the context of a particular case. That is their obligation. But they have to decide those questions according to the rule of law, not their own social preferences, not their policy views, not their personal preferences, but according to the rule of law.…”