[Roberts' dissent is a] pretty big deal, ... The fact that he was willing to challenge the Endangered Species Act as a brand-new judge, when lots of his Republican colleagues went the other way, indicates that he really wanted to make a statement.

We wonder why we have got the Freemen or the militants. We wonder why we have got unrest in this country. It is because our government, in fact, has got out of hand and out of line, with the Endangered Species Act.

The Endangered Species Act is the strongest and most effective tool we have to repair the environmental harm that is causing a species to decline.

[At the same time, there is a growing pile of tidbits, in Roberts' opinions and in the Reagan-era documents dribbling out of the White House, that indicates he has strongly held and far-right views on major fronts—abortion, religion, and executive power. There's ammunition for principled opposition to be mined here. But the key attribute Roberts lacks from the point of view of the legal liberals, at least on the record, is an overarching, burn-the-house-down judicial philosophy. As a result, proponents of judicial restraint—an approach to the law that's become as fashionable among liberals as conservatives—are eager to embrace him as one of their own. Leftish advocates of restraint celebrate justices who don't reach out beyond the facts of a case to decide more than they need to and who respect existing Supreme Court precedent. They wrinkle their noses at justices who overtly seek to impose a rightward agenda (Antonin Scalia) and are willing to jettison past decisions to do it (Clarence Thomas). Roberts has never declared himself one of the bad guys, Sunstein pointed out hopefully in a recent piece in the New Republic . Instead he has styled himself as deliberate, lawyerly, process-oriented. His opinions on the D.C. Circuit court of appeals] avoid broad pronouncements, ... They do not try to reorient the law.

It is a drastic mistake to eliminate the provisions that have to do with the protection of habitat for endangered species. It is my opinion that the Endangered Species Act is 99 percent about protecting critical habitat.

Endangered species are our friends.