Battle lines re-forming in fight for O'Connor's swing-vote seat

WASHINGTON — With John Roberts on course to be confirmed this week as the nation's 17th chief justice, conservatives and liberals alike are turning their attention to the next fight — over a successor to retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Roberts, nominated by President Bush after the Sept. 3 death of William Rehnquist, should be confirmed by a comfortable margin when his nomination comes to the Senate floor this week. Even Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean conceded in an e-mail to party activists Friday that "it is obvious that the Republican-controlled Senate will confirm" him.

Roberts' support extends well beyond the 55 Republicans in the Senate, however. He has enough Democratic support to stop any attempt to filibuster his nomination. Sixty votes are needed to cut off debate, and at least 11 Democrats have announced they will vote to confirm him.

But with Bush soon expected to name a replacement for O'Connor, the same battle lines in the Roberts fight are forming again, the most aggressive, so far, being the conservative activists who find Roberts unsettling.

Some conservatives aren't convinced that Bush, with his choice of Roberts to succeed Rehnquist, fulfilled his White House campaign promise to appoint justices in the mold of the Supreme Court's two most conservative judges — Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

They are demanding that the president name a Scalia- or Thomas-like successor for O'Connor, the first woman on the high court who frequently voted with liberal justices in cases involving cultural issues, most particularly, those challenging abortion rights.

"There's a lot of disquiet in (conservative) groups," Robert Bork, whose failed nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 marked a new era of heated political partisanship in judicial nominations, told reporters at a private breakfast Friday. "For them, Roberts' greatest asset is that People for the American Way, NOW, NARAL and so forth hate him — my enemy's enemy is my friend."

While Roberts is clearly conservative, in Bork's view, the 50-year-old appellate court judge is hardly in the mold of Scalia or Thomas and is unlikely to lead the court in overturning the 1973 landmark case, Roe v. Wade, that established abortion rights in the United States. "Roberts replacing Rehnquist insofar as that has any effect . . . may be to move the court slightly to the left," he added.