A few weeks after President Bush nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court, the Los Angeles Times reported that as a lawyer he had helped gay-rights activists win a Supreme Court case. The story didn’t worry conservatives too much because even people who objected to the Court’s decision in that case could see that Roberts had done laughably little to contribute to it–he had done close to the bare minimum that a polite person could do for a colleague.
That is the type of defense that Jim Geraghty wishes Fred Thompson had made for his possible pro-abortion lobbying. If that defense is true, I think it would work. What will not work, I think, is for Thompson to argue that it was okay to lobby for liberalizing abortion rules because he was just representing a client. That’s a very weak argument, and I don’t think many people are going to buy it.
(For a run-down of Thompson’s abortion record, see here.)