I don’t think attacks like hers are going to prove very effective (nor should they). Get past the rhetoric about Roberts’s supposed hostility to (the liberal version of) the Bill of Rights, and you’re left with complaints about briefs on which Roberts worked in the solicitor general’s office during the first Bush administration.

She doesn’t just make the already-familiar complaint that one of those briefs called for Roe to be overturned. She also complains that the point of that brief was to allow the federal government to condition its subsidies to family-planning counselors on their not discussing abortion. She describes the case, Rust v. Sullivan, a bit differently than I just did, of course.

Then there’s this: “How mainstream, though, is Roberts’ apparent support for the militant anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue? In 1993, a case was brought to the High Court by a group of abortion providers who accused Operation Rescue and six of its activists of violating a federal civil-rights statute by obstructing patients’ access to women’s health clinics. . . . The kicker to Roberts’ role on behalf of Operation Rescue (Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic ) was that although the case did not involve the government, Roberts, deputy to then-Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, felt compelled to co-author an amicus curiae brief in support of an organization bent on terrorizing and demonizing pregnant women.”

How mainstream is it? Mainstream enough that the Supreme Court ruled the way Roberts and Starr urged them to–a fact that Stan neglects to mention. (She also neglects to mention that the administration won Rust v. Sullivan, too, and even got David Souter’s vote.) I kept looking for the part of the opinion where the Court came out for terrorizing and demonizing women, but I haven’t found it yet. Perhaps the Court did not think Stans’s characterization of the case to be a reasonable one.

Stan concludes that Roberts should not be confirmed because “[h]e has demonstrated too little respect for the ideals of the Constitution’s Framers,” who I guess were all into abortion on demand.

She complains, also, that Roberts doesn’t have much of a paper trail. Maybe that’s because Democrats held up his confirmation for more than a decade–and maybe that’s because they pay too much attention to people like Stan.