The nomination of John Roberts to the US supreme courts looks like a canny political move by George Bush. No one, no matter what they tell you, was really expecting this. Andrew Sullivan's response – "Gist here. Bio here. I need to know a lot more before saying anything else" – is perhaps the most honest of the lot.
Before the announcement, pundits and bloggers were expecting a woman (firstly, because the appointee would replace Sandra Day O'Connor; secondly, because that's what Laura Bush was hoping for). Edith Jones, a doctrinaire rightwinger, was one possibility. The Bush v Choice website (which styles itself a "pro-choice anti-Bush action centre") meanwhile declared, "The buzz is all about Judge Edith Clement," and examined her decisions to explain why it was not happy with her record on abortion.
But, as the Guardian reports, 50-year-old Mr Roberts has not been long enough in his present job at Washington's federal appeal court to leave behind much of a "paper trail". He is not enough of a known quantity for Bush administration opponents to rally against him. It is something that could have informed the president's thinking after he failed to get the Senate to back the hawkish John Bolton's nomination to the UN - and faced accusations he was a lame duck.
Another rumoured contender who will not be getting a new job is the US attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez. A memo describing the Geneva conventions as "quaint" forms part of his paper trail.
"Fooled you all, didn't I? [...] Also, hey, Al: I never liked you that much," is Wonkette's summarisation of Mr Bush's speech outlining the nomination.
The man Mr Bush hopes will take up a lifetime appointment to the supreme court bench is described as a conservative but not an outspoken ideologue. The president said Mr Roberts had "the qualities Americans expect in a judge: experience, wisdom, fairness, and civility".
Appointments to the nine-judge bench are a sensitive issue in the US, not least because Mr Robert's nomination is the first for 11 years. Democrats fear a new front opening in the US's culture wars over abortion and gay marriage if the supreme court falls under the sway of ideologically-motivated social conservatives.
Slate has a bigger piece than most on Mr Roberts. It says he has a "reputation for being likeable and fair-minded [and] may indeed turn out to be a wise, thoughtful, and appealing justice" but it is alarmed at a decision last week at the federal appeal court. In the court's opinion on the case Rumsfeld v Hamdan (a man held in Guantánamo Bay, who is alleged to have been a Bin Laden bodyguard and driver ) it says Mr Roberts wrote the Bush administration a "blank cheque" to try foreign nationals suspected of terrorism at whatever kind of tribunal it likes - even taking away the presumption of innocence.
Salon joins in with another meaty assessment. It says the appointment at first looks like a political masterstroke, but that Mr Bush may have miscalculated the nature of the Senate confirmation process.
President Bush has made ideology a critical basis for selection of his judicial nominees, and Democrats in the Senate have responded in kind. Senator Charles Schumer of New York, in particular, has argued in the context of lower-court nominations that the Senate need not and ought not to confirm judges who refuse to divulge their own views about the meaning of the constitution.
And already he and Senator Dick Durbin, who, like Schumer, sits on the judiciary committee, have said that they have an obligation to find out what Judge Roberts thinks about the most important constitutional questions, including the scope of the constitutional right to privacy, which the supreme court has held protects a woman's right to choose abortion.
The confirmation hearings are unlikely to be a repeat of those for Mr Bolton, but the pressure will be on if Democrats in the Senate decide to make his elevation to the supreme court as difficult as possible. "No one is entitled to a free pass to a lifetime appointment to the supreme court," said Senator Patrick Leahy, the leading Democrat on the judiciary committee.
