Hat Tip to RedState.org, who printed a daily memorandum from Jay Sekulow and Leonard Leo making the case that “John Roberts represents a promise kept by the President.”

Leonard Leo is Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society as well as the chairman of Catholic Outreach for the Republican Party.

Jay Sekulow is Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a law firm and educational organization that specializes in religious liberty and sanctity of life issues. He has a very good radio show as well as a television show which I haven’t yet seen.

Leo and Sekulow are both top-notch heavy-hitters who know their stuff. I’ve followed both of them for years and trust them like I trust my family. Hey, we’ve got Conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants working together — what a novel concept!

The newsletter notes something that I posted at Free Republic the other day; namely that the views of Roberts on stare decisis match those of Clarence Thomas.

In Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing, he said that “stare decisis provides continuity to our system, it provides predictability, and in our process of case-by-case decision making, I think it is a very important and critical concept.” Thomas grants importance to stare decisis but he has also been more than willing to seek to overturn bad precedent when it conflicts with the constitution.

I feel comfortable that Roberts represents the kind of Justice that we want on the Supreme Court. He has the mindset of Scalia and Thomas but, perhaps more importantly, has a more persuasive temperament and is liable to turn some anti-conservative 5-4 decisions into pro-conservative, pro-constitutional 5-4 decisions. It’s great to appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court, but it’s even better to appoint a conservative who could change the minds of a few fence-sitting Justices.

From Leo and Sekulow

After two days of intense and wide-ranging testimony, there can be no doubt that Judge John Roberts embraces the judicial philosophy articulated by President George W.Bush in two presidential campaigns and on the occasions where the President announced Judge Roberts’s nomination to be an Associate Justice and then Chief Justice.

Likewise Judge Roberts did not play the liberals’ game of prejudging cases that might come before him such as abortion. His testimony on the right to privacy mirrored that of Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Indeed, he refused to concede that there was a “general” privacy right, resisting Senator Schumer’s effort to force the term. And, consistent with Justice Thomas’s confirmation testimony, Judge Roberts would not embrace the non-marital right to privacy, stating simply that he had no “quarrel” with Eisenstadt.

Below are some examples of his judicial conservatism in his own words:

—- Roberts on Judicial Misuse of Foreign Law… “As somebody said in another context, looking at foreign law for support is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends. You can find them. They’re there. And that actually expands the discretion of the judge. It allows the judge to incorporate his or her own personal preferences, cloak them with the authority of precedent — because they’re finding precedent in foreign law — and use that to determine the meaning of the Constitution. And I think that’s a misuse of precedent, not a correct use of precedent.”

—- Roberts on Federalism… “[T]he framers’ essential vision [is] that we are dealing with the federal system in which vast powers reside with the states and that the federal government is one of limited powers; broad in, obviously, particular areas, and broad under the Necessary and Proper Clause, but limited powers nonetheless.”

—- Roberts on the Judicial Role… “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 furthest thingfrom their minds. Now, judges have to decide hard questions when they come up in the context of a particular case. That’s 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 — according to the rule of law.”

“[T]he role of the judge is limited; the judge is to decide the cases before them; they’re not to legislate; they’re not to execute the laws.”

“All judges are acutely aware of the fact that millions and millions of people have voted for you [Senators] and not one has voted for any of us [judges]. That means that you have the responsibility of representing the policy preferences of the people…. Our job is a very different one. We have to consider cases that raise the question from time to time whether a particular piece of legislation is constitutional. And we have to limit ourselves in doing that to applying the law and not in any way substituting ourselves for the policy choices you’ve made.”

“Judges don’t have a license to go out and decide, ‘I think this is an injustice and so I’m going to do something to fix it.’ That type of judicial role, I think, is inconsistent with the role the Framers intended.”

—- Roberts on Death Penalty Stall and Delay Tactics…. “And the question is do you allow someone who has raised several claims over the years to suddenly say at the last minute somebody who just died was the person who committed the murder, and does that mean you start the trial all over again simply on the basis of that last minute claim or do you require more of a showing at that stage.”

—- Roberts on the Rule of Law.… “Here was the United states, the most powerful entity in the world, aligned against my client. And, yet, all I had to do was convince the court that I was right on the law and the government was wrong and all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law. That is a remarkable thing. It is what we mean when we say that we are a government of laws and not men. It is that rule of law that protects the rights and liberties of all Americans. It is the envy of the world. Because without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.”