JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS was a member of the ill-fated White House basketball team in the 1986 City of Alexandria Men’s Division D. I know, as I was the player-coach on a squad that went 1-9, and which depended on speechwriters Peter Robinson and Josh Gilder to work the boards and Roberts to hit 20 footers. I say this only to point out that I agree with hard left critics of Judge Roberts’ nomination in so far as he could have used more time on the bench. We all could have used more time on that bench.

The four years that John Roberts served as associate counsel to President Reagan under Fred Fielding and Deputy Counsel Dick Hauser, from 1982 to 1986, has been widely noted in the biographical profile of President Bush’s nominee to replace Justice O’Connor, but it is passed over quickly on the way to noting Roberts’s extraordinary record as an advocate before the SCOTUS as both a lawyer for clients and as a representative of the United States government. That service is one of the many reasons why Judge Roberts will make an outstanding Supreme Court jurist.