...There are really many kinds of conservatives, you know. It doesn't really help us to say, “Is Judge Roberts a conservative or a moderate or a textualist or a liberal?” That's not really the point. You know, there are some conservatives, libertarian conservatives, who take great exception to the PATRIOT Act, who worry about police search and seizure powers of the kind you were just discussing, who worry about the idea of the President simply seizing power to classify prisoners abroad or to go across national boundaries in violation of treaty with no possibility of judicial review. This is not about liberal and conservatism. This is about an image of the imperial presidency or an image of strong executive power, whether you're talking about a local police force or the White House. And that, I think, is the tradition which Judge Roberts most definitively belongs to.

-Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor for The Nation and a national correspondent for Salon.com. He also teaches journalism at Yale University.