Why Does He Hate Toads?

SCOTUS nominee John G. Roberts not a green's first pick

President Bush's new Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. has a distinguished conservative pedigree: He clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist and was deputy White House counsel during the Reagan administration. With only two years under his belt as a federal judge, Roberts' attitudes toward environmental law are not well-documented, but as a deputy solicitor general in Bush Sr.'s administration he won a Supreme Court case blocking National Wildlife Federation members from filing claims against mining on 4,500 acres of public land. Roberts also wrote rather sarcastic comments about California's arroyo toad in his dissent from a 2003 court decision upholding protection of the amphibian under the Endangered Species Act. Roberts has served on the legal advisory council of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, an anti-regulation conservative advocacy organization, and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, which worries that the legal profession is dominated by a liberal ideology.