E-Mail This Article to a Friend SKIM MILK AND WHITE BREAD Bush’s new scrub BY ADAM REILLY

John Roberts. The name sounds like the man looks: pleasant, bland, reassuring. Chalk it up to the neck-beard, but Robert Bork, the failed Republican Supreme Court nominee of 1987, looked like he wanted to go eat some children. And his surname practically begged to be turned into a verb. Aesthetically, Roberts — whom President George W. Bush nominated Tuesday evening to fill the Supreme Court seat soon to be vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor — should be a much easier sell.

But that doesn’t mean that Roberts, who graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, will cruise through his confirmation hearings. A half-hour after Bush introduced his nominee, Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, panned Roberts as a closet ideologue. "There’s nothing that would in any way demonstrate a willingness to think in a non-doctrinaire fashion like Sandra Day O’Connor did," Lynn said. "You couldn’t always predict where she was going to go: she’d ask a lot of tough questions and frequently come down as the decisive fifth vote on a variety of issues. There’s nothing in his somewhat-minimal record to indicate that he has that kind of creativity from the bench."

Roberts’ 1992 involvement in Lee v. Weisman is especially worrisome to Lynn. In that Supreme Court case, which involved regular graduation-ceremony prayers in the Providence, Rhode Island, public schools, Roberts, then principal deputy solicitor general, co-authored an amicus brief defending the practice: his reasoning, Lynn claims, "essentially called for overturning the last 50 years of legal thinking about religious liberty and the separation of church and state." (By a 5-4 margin, the court ruled that the graduation prayers were unconstitutional.)

Then there’s the abortion issue — which, given the longstanding conservative goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, promises to be front and center as the Roberts debate unfolds. In another amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court as principal deputy solicitor general, in the case Rust v. Sullivan, Roberts, who is Roman Catholic, wrote: "We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

Little wonder, then, that proponents of abortion rights were irate after Roberts’s nomination became public. "This is a devastating announcement," Melissa Kogut, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, said Tuesday night. "We need a Supreme Court that’s going to uphold the right to privacy. This is a devastating move by the president, especially given the make-up of Congress and the Senate."

By Wednesday morning, for these and other reasons — Roberts’s slim public history also includes questionable decisions on the environment and civil liberties — the liberal push against Roberts had begun in earnest, with MoveOn.org ("We’ve got to stop Roberts") leading the way. Exactly how the debate will play out is anyone’s guess, but count on this: on some level, Roberts’s inoffensive packaging will help his cause. Score another one for the ever-skillful Bush PR machine.