THIS IS WHAT CONSERVATIVES DO

I didn't get around to reading Jeff Toobin's New Yorker piece about Chief Justice Roberts until I came across Matt Yglesias post about a recent Roberts decision. Toobin wrote:

Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

This is what conservatives believe in, the defense of the status quo, and you can find that in the writings of Burke, Hayek and Kirk, and many other conservative thinkers.

In the latest case, a man in Alaska was convicted of raping, assaulting and kidnapping a woman in 1993. The man, William G. Osborne, wants to pay for DNA testing to prove his innocence and Roberts is so enamored of the status quo that he denied this simple request:

Allowing Osburne to prove his potential innocence, Roberts said, risks “unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.”

"Overthrowing" is the rhetoric of an extremist, not an umpire.