This is How It Begins -- Kerry Requests Documents on Roberts

AP reports:

Democratic Sen. John Kerry urged the White House on Friday to release "in their entirety" all documents and memos from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' tenure in two Republican administrations.

"We cannot do our duty if either Judge Roberts or the Bush administration hides elements of his professional record," said the Massachusetts senator who was his party's presidential candidate last year.

Opening what is expected to be a broader attempt by Democrats to pry loose documents, Kerry issued his statement as Roberts made the latest in a series of courtesy calls on senators in advance of confirmation hearings.

Read it here.

The Democrat strategy on Roberts has been clear all along. They will speak moderately, with respect for the nominee, and simply request a few documents to answer some "troubling" questions a few might have. Then they will request a few more. They might find something that they find "troubling" in some of these, which will initiate a request for more documents. And so it goes. At some point they will infringe on White House perogatives and their request will be denied. This will trigger the "extraordinary" circumstances that will justify a filibuster and things will get really, really nasty.

Remember the nastiness over Bolton? That was just a trial run for this one.

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Rebecca Bernstein over at HNN notes that Roberts' first love was Clio.

Judge John G. Roberts, the nominee picked by President Bush for the Supreme Court to take the place of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, has earned many honors in life, starting with several awards for papers concerned with history, which he earned while an undergraduate at Harvard University in the early 1970s.

Judge Roberts graduated from Harvard in 1976 and then continued on to Harvard Law School. However, law was not always the career path he intended to take. “John loved history," recalled Roberts's college roommate, Robert N. Bush, in an interview with the Harvard Crimson, "and said he’d be a history professor." He majored in history and wrote a thesis. But by his final year as an undergraduate he had changed his mind and decided to go to law school instead.

Read it here.