correction on John Roberts

Realdebate, a rightist poster who runs a site called realdebatewisconsin.blogspot.com, corrected me on the post I made in the hours after the John Roberts nomination. I read two separate articles, one in the Washington Post and one at Newsmax, that claimed that he was a member of the Federalist society. In fact, as I was directed to this link, this has been widely misreported in the media. Much of the confusion is apparently caused by the fact that the Federalist Society keeps its membership list secret, thus affording them more protection from prying reporters than our White House affords CIA agents.

Here at Deep Thought, we endeavor to only pass on accurate information. As such, I am stating for the record that

John G. Roberts is NOT a member of the Federalist Society, so whatever their positions are, does not apply to him.

UPDATE (7/26/05): Now we have a new piece of information. Apparently the society had a directory for members, published in 1997-1998, which lists John Roberts as a member of the steering committee for the organization's Washington section. So he apparently was not only a member, but served in a leadership role. The Bush administration took the unusual step of denying his membership the other day, but it is hard to deny he was a member at least in 1997-98 if he was actually involved with directing the Washington branch of the society. But that is another example of the kind of misdirection that we have seen coming from this White House for the last five years. We will keep our eyes on this story.