Senator Schumer said Thursday that he had been waking up in the middle of the night, “unsure how to vote” on President Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to the post of chief justice of the United States. With the Judiciary Committee on which Mr. Schumer sits scheduled to meet tomorrow to vote on the nomination, perhaps we can help the senior senator put his mind to rest, by starting with the standard Mr. Schumer himself laid out in his opening statement during the Roberts confirmation hearings.

“To me the pivotal question, which will determine my vote is this: Are you within the mainstream – albeit the conservative mainstream – or are you an ideologue who will seek to use the Court to impose your views upon us, as certain judges – past and present, on the left and on the right – have attempted to do,” Mr. Schumer said. The senior senator from New York, a Democrat, went on, “Judge Roberts, if you answer important questions forthrightly and convince me that you are a jurist in the broad mainstream, I will be able to vote for you.”

Is Judge Roberts in the mainstream? Listen to veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder, a sober centrist if there ever were one: Judge Roberts, he wrote, “is so obviously – ridiculously – well equipped to lead government’s third branch that it is hard to imagine how any Democrats can justify a vote against his confirmation.” The judge, the columnist continued, is “so far from the caricature of a conservative ideologue depicted by some of the interest groups that their attacks seem absurd.”

A Washington Post editorial called for confirming Roberts and said, “Given his comments about precedent and the right to privacy, we do not believe a Chief Justice Roberts will be eager to overturn federal abortion rights.” The mainstream liberal Los Angeles Times called Judge Roberts “an exceptionally qualified nominee, well within the mainstream of American legal thought, who deserves broad bipartisan support.” The newspaper said, “If a majority of Democrats in the Senate vote against Roberts, they will reveal themselves as nothing more than self-defeating obstructionists.”

Senator Specter, a Republican who favors abortion rights and voted against the confirmation of Robert Bork in 1987, will vote to confirm Judge Roberts. Mr. Specter spoke on the Senate floor this week of the judge’s “support of gay rights,” and he said Judge Roberts “talked very directly when questioned about the right of privacy. He said that Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right of privacy, was correctly decided.” Other centrist Republicans who support abortion rights and who have expressed support for the Roberts nomination include Governor Pataki, Mayor Giuliani, and the chairwoman of Republicans for Choice, Ann Stone.

Why dwell on this? The reason is that the left-wing in this debate is up to its old tricks, trying to paint Judge Roberts as being one out of the mainstream. It was a stunt it pulled off successfully in the case of Judge Bork. But this time, something funny is happening on the way to the Borking. It turns out that the ones opposing Judge Roberts’s confirmation – our Republican Mayor Bloomberg and the editorial board of the New York Times – are the ones who suddenly look out of the mainstream and the judge is the one who looks to be in the center of it, not surprising in a country that has delivered a Republican majority in both houses of Congress.