01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- JOHN ROBERTS is a decent family man and a bright, articulate, thoughtful judge. He has a quality absent in such previous right-wing Supreme Court candidates as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork: a judicial temperament that makes litigants feel they have been respectfully heard, whether they are on the winning or the losing side of a verdict.

But John Roberts is the wrong man for the job of chief justice of the United States.

Although the White House has withheld key documents -- out of either incompetence or fear that they might prove embarrassing -- we have learned enough from the Reagan Library files on Roberts to make it clear that his nomination as chief justice should be rejected.

This conclusion has only been solidified by Roberts's testimony during last week's Senate hearings. He has been a polished performer, but in failing to present clear answers to straightforward questions, Roberts missed a crucial opportunity to address legitimate concerns about his record, and to show compassion for those who have been excluded from the American Dream.

The consistent mark of Roberts's career is a lack of commitment to making the Constitution's promise of equal protection a reality for all Americans -- particularly the most vulnerable in our society. He has opposed laws protecting the rights of girls to have the same opportunities in sports as boys. He has argued that politicians, not individual women themselves, should control women's reproductive-health care. He has opposed various remedies for the racial injustices that have occurred in America since slavery, and which persist today. He has consistently joined the radical right in seeking to weaken voting-rights protections -- in essence, attacking the right of black and Hispanic voters to cast their ballots without paying poll taxes or being subjected to intimidation or gerrymandering. He has fought against protecting all Americans from workplace discrimination.

Most worrisome, Roberts has refused to answer questions on his limited view of the right to personal privacy -- a right that most Americans take for granted.

Over the last half-century, we have made great progress in promoting equal opportunity for all Americans, but there is still much work to do. Hurricane Katrina was more than the most catastrophic natural disaster in American history; those who have in so many ways been denied the opportunity for full participation in our society once again suffered disproportionately in this tragedy -- elderly people, African-Americans, those burdened by poverty.

Now is not the time for a chief justice who is bent on turning back the progress we have made in moving America forward.

Judge Roberts is said to love the law. But loving the law without loving the American people enough to protect their individual rights will make our American community weaker. And exercising the law without compassion -- of which Judge Roberts and so many on the far right have consistently been guilty -- undermines the grace and wisdom of the Founders, whose sense of balance and fairness made this country great.

In the past few weeks, we have seen what happens when politics and indifference supersede organization and compassion. The enduring lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that there are still too many Americans who are disproportionately vulnerable. Even though they worked hard and played by the rules, their luck ran out.

Americans are a fair-minded, compassionate people. Our nation is great and strong because of that compassion -- not just because we have a strong military. We also have strong moral values, which include an innate sense of justice, often absent in other parts of the world.

Yet our federal government today shrinks from compassion. In doing so, officials have diminished America in the eyes of the world and, now, in the eyes of our own people.

This is a time for justice tempered with understanding and mercy. There is no evidence of either in Judge Roberts's career.

President Bush should be denied this nomination.

Howard Dean, M.D., is chairman of the Democratic National Committee.