Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Justice at Home (Plate)

In his opening statement of his confirmation hearings, John Roberts used a baseball analogy (a pretty good one, in my estimation) to explain how he saw his role as Chief Justice: he's like a baseball umpire. "It's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." It's a simple explanation, and one that will certainly play well over TV and radio.

Ed Kilgore at Newdonkey.com takes it further (on a handy double-play from Armando at dailykos.)

Rob

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But as Joe Biden pointed out, the umpire gets to establish the strike zone. Now I don't exactly know what that means, but it sounds as though an umpire/SCJ has a lot more discretion than Roberts would admit.

Cecilia

Rob S. said...

He said that? Cool. That's pretty much what Armando at daily kos said in the post I linked to. Nice to know it's getting out there.