July 29 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush must be slapping his thigh and laughing out loud as he watches Senate Democrats sputter over his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In John G. Roberts Jr., he has a candidate who looks a lot like someone who would move the court rightward on a host of issues, and there's not a darn thing Democrats can do about it.

Conservative as he is, Roberts is so smart, so not-a-nut and so downright likeable by all accounts that it's hard to put up much of a fight without looking like a party pooper.

``Strategically, a brilliant nomination,'' says Lee Epstein, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the book ``Advice and Consent: The Politics of Appointing Federal Judges,'' to be published in September.

So when Senate Democrats complained this week that the White House had already declared off-limits certain records they might want, the senators come off as ornery.

The Bush administration is handing the Senate Judiciary Committee material ``that goes above and beyond what any reasonable person would expect,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters this week. ``It's more than what they need.''

Now the president is telling senators what they do and don't need to do their job.

75,000 Documents

Without being asked to do so, the White House orchestrated delivery of 75,000 documents on Roberts, none more recent than 19 years old, from his days in the Reagan White House and Reagan Justice Department.

What won't be forthcoming, McClellan said, are records of Roberts's more recent role in the Justice Department of President George H.W. Bush. For four years as deputy solicitor general he helped shape administration positions on legal matters including abortion and affirmative action.

By drowning senators in 75,000 pages of documents, the White House is being ``very generous,'' Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a floor speech. The fact that the papers were already in the public domain doesn't seem to diminish the scope of said generosity.

Certainly, the benefactor of such largess couldn't be called stingy for drawing a line somewhere, right? And yet, there's little rational distinction between the type of papers the White House has declared off-limits and the type it is distributing.

All involve discussions among lawyers about administration legal positions. The law favors the release of White House documents and grants more discretion in disclosing similar Justice Department documents, McClellan said.

Previous Administrations

Previous administrations, such as Reagan's, have said yes to releasing the same sort of Justice Department memos this administration refuses to let go.

There's nothing unreasonable about senators' wanting documents that might shed light on a nominee's legal thinking.

McConnell says the Democrats are asking for the papers as part of a ``plan of attack.'' He points to a July 3 Washington Post story, published before the nominee was named, reporting that one of ``three likely lines of attack'' for Democrats would be a claim they'd been given insufficient documents. Aha!

If this demand for documents is part of a planned attack, then the 75,000 unsolicited documents were the ammo in a preemptive strike.

Oh yes, Bush is surely chortling now.

Of course, another way to defeat the Democrats' attack plan would be to give them what they want. But the White House doesn't have to. It doesn't want to. And it won't.

Former Solicitors

Republicans are waving about a 2002 letter from seven former solicitors general who served presidents of both parties. They were arguing against releasing memoranda written by a Court of Appeals candidate, Miguel Estrada, while at the solicitor general's office. Disclosure would stifle the candor necessary for such discussions, they wrote.

What Republicans don't mention is that at least one of the letter's signatories this week said the case for release of those memos is stronger for Roberts than it was for Estrada. Roberts is going for a higher court, and his position in the solicitor general's office was as a political, policy-making appointee, unlike Estrada, wrote Walter Dellinger, a solicitor general in the Bill Clinton administration.

Roberts's record as so far revealed isn't shocking. But it does provoke understandable concern among those who worry he would nudge the Supreme Court away from protecting civil rights, women's rights and the rights of the criminally accused. Roberts's writings at the Reagan Justice Department and the Reagan White House show little affinity for those values.

No. 1 Issue: Abortion

On the No. 1 issue, abortion, it may or may not be fair to attribute to Roberts a brief he co-signed asking that Roe v. Wade be reversed.

Roberts says he is not an ideologue, and there's little evidence that he is.

Still, there's no doubt Roberts would be a more consistent vote for the conservative position than that of the justice he would replace, Sandra Day O'Connor, often the swing vote on hot- button issues.

Beyond the single vote Roberts would get, he surely would become a persuasive force in garnering votes for his side, given his intellect, his affability and his intricate knowledge of the sitting judges.

And that is what should cause the Democrats the most concern, and bring a smile to the face of the president.

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 29, 2005 09:59 EDT