Specter a Wild Card in Senate Hearings on Roberts

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

President Bush announced this morning he's nominated John Roberts to succeed William Rehnquist as Supreme Court chief justice. William Rehnquist died on Saturday. Mr. Bush made the announcement this morning just before leaving to tour hurricane damage. Mr. Bush had already nominated John Roberts to fill the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and he said the Senate should confirm Roberts by the time the high court begins its new term next month. The man presiding over the hearings will be Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. NPR's Nina Totenberg has this profile.

(Soundbite of squash game)

NINA TOTENBERG reporting:

It's 6:00 in the morning, and on a squash court in Philadelphia Arlen Specter is battling away against a staffer half his age. No matter that he's weakened by an aggressive form of cancer, Specter is fighting as he always does, giving no quarter to disease or to his opponents.

Senator ARLEN SPECTER (Republican, Philadelphia): My basic statement, Nina, is that I beat brain surgery, a heart bypass and a lot of tough political opponents, and I'm gonna beat this, too.

TOTENBERG: As for who wins those daily squash games, well, Specter says he never kisses and tells.

Sen. SPECTER: My definition of winning, Nina, at squash, is playing and surviving, and I've never lost a match.

TOTENBERG: Arlen Specter has played and survived by a hair all his life. Last year he barely survived a tough primary challenge from a conservative opponent, and then just when he was poised to ascend to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee after 24 years in the Senate, he outraged conservatives with some abortion-rights remarks and had to placate them by promising not to oppose any Bush judicial nominees in committee. He made no commitments on his Senate floor votes, though.

Nothing has come easy to Specter. As a boy, his was the only Jewish family in the farming community of Russell, Kansas.

Sen. SPECTER: Well, I didn't know I was supposed to be different because I was Jewish. The much greater impact on me was that there was a Depression on, and my father had to go door to door selling cantaloupes and open a junk yard a hundred miles away and be gone all week. And when my mother had a gallbladder attack, we didn't have a nickel to buy a Coca-Cola down at the store. Now I knew we were the only Jewish family in town, but so what? So what?

TOTENBERG: For Specter, the answer was to make his parents proud by getting good grades, graduating with honors from the University of Pennsylvania and then Yale Law School. Success came fast. He won election as district attorney of Philadelphia at age 35, amassing a record as a crusading prosecutor over two terms. After that, though, he lost four races for district attorney, mayor, senator and governor before finally winning the Senate seat he now holds. When Specter arrived in the Senate 24 years ago, there were at least a dozen moderate Republicans just like him. Now there are only four. But Specter is the high-profile powerhouse who most draws the ire of conservative Republicans. Last year the National Review put him on its cover with the headline The Worst Republican Senator.

There are lots of things that have made Arlen Specter the voodoo doll of GOP conservatives: his outspoken support for abortion rights; his advocacy of civil rights legislation; and then, of course, the cardinal sin: his vote against the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. In a recent interview I asked him if he regrets his Bork vote.

Sen. SPECTER: Absolutely not. Judge Bork had a view of the Constitution which was different from anybody else who'd ever been nominated to the court. He was doubtless a brilliant man, but he could have turned the Constitution upside-down.

TOTENBERG: But Specter is hardly the darling of the left either. Many remember how Specter, faced with a likely primary challenge from conservatives in 1991, led hostile questioning of Anita Hill at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Sen. SPECTER: It is my legal judgment that the testimony of Professor Hill in the morning was flat-out perjury.

TOTENBERG: Specter's treatment of Hill nearly cost him his Senate seat anyway. His Democratic opponent made the hearings the central issue of the campaign, and in a three-way race Specter eked out a victory with just 49 percent of the vote.

Sen. SPECTER: It is sort of an occupational hazard of mine to be stuck in the middle. And I will support my party when I can. But if it's a matter of conscience, I may have to disagree. One of my colleagues once said that I had the unique ability to alienate the entire electorate with two votes, against Bork and for Thomas.

TOTENBERG: Specter had his last round of chemotherapy in late July. But when we spent a whole day with him in June, he was in the throes of it, swilling Gatorade, grabbing Kleenex for his runny nose and eyes, bald and losing weight, but doggedly carrying out a brutal schedule. First, it was squash, then meetings in the office, then a Judiciary Committee session on a controversial nominee. With not enough senators there for a vote, Specter said the committee would meet again later in the day.

(Soundbite of footsteps)

TOTENBERG: Then we were off to the Senate floor and a meeting off the floor with a half dozen CEOs of big computer software companies.

Sen. SPECTER: Why don't we sit down for just a minute?

Unidentified Man #1: Great.

TOTENBERG: The CEOs were worried about being shut out of trade with China, about patent laws, and they were worried about an imminent Supreme Court decision on computer file-sharing.

Unidentified Man #2: We encourage you and your colleagues not to overreact.

Sen. SPECTER: We seldom overreact. We seldom react at all.

(Soundbite of laughter)

TOTENBERG: Next, we were off to a room somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol.

Sen. SPECTER: Which group is this, Blaine(ph)?

BLAINE: This is the Legal Reform Agenda with the Senate Republican Conference, sir.

Sen. SPECTER: What does that mean?

How you-all doing?

Unidentified Man #3: Good.

Unidentified Woman: Fine. How are you?

Sen. SPECTER: Howdy.

TOTENBERG: It's basically a tort reform group and Specter uses the platform to campaign for a bill he's brokered with Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy limiting asbestos suits. Somewhere in all of this Specter goes off for a closed-door meeting with the chairman of the House Transportation Committee. The Pennsylvania senator is trying to get money put back into a bill to fund a pet project of his: high-speed rail routes in several areas of the country, including one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. And so it goes, hour after hour after hour. Specter is supposed to take an early evening train to Philadelphia for his chemo the next day, but he doesn't make it, leaving early the next morning instead. As he says, with a rueful smile, he's a fireman in constant motion.

This week the fire will be the confirmation hearings for John Roberts. Now Specter has made clear that he wants answers to a lot of questions he has about memos Roberts wrote as a young aide in the Reagan administration. Indeed, a fair reading of some of those memos would suggest that back in the early and mid-'80s at least, Roberts' views were very much like those of Robert Bork, the nominee Specter thought would have turned the Constitution on its head. What Specter wants to know is whether Roberts still stands by those memos.

Sen. SPECTER: We're going to see if those reflect his current view.

TOTENBERG: Specter sees his own independence as critical this week. He'll be walking a narrow line and trying to avoid reawakening any of the old fights with conservative groups, while at the same time trying to let the Democrats have their due. He knows what some of his conservative opponents say about him: that his independence is a form of disloyalty to his president and party.

Sen. SPECTER: On the personal level, I find it very annoying. But institutionally, they're not gonna prevail. America's too strong for them to prevail. So Hogemmundrare(ph). You know any Yiddish? That's a polite way of saying, `Blank 'em.' Hogemmundrare. Let them do what they want to do and I'm gonna do what I want to do.

TOTENBERG: Admired for his mastery of public policy matters large and small, respected for his hard work, his intellectual acumen and his sheer doggedness, Specter is also seen by some as an opportunist, and is notorious for his sharp elbows and porcupinelike personality.

You know they call you Snarlin' Arlen.

Sen. SPECTER: It's a bad rap. It all came about because some people call me Darlin' Arlen. And they were trying to look for something that rhymed with Arlen and Darlin' which was nasty. It's a bad rap.

TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

MONTAGNE: You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

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