Politics & Power Quote by Michael Oxley

Oxley’s line is a small masterclass in partisan framing: it turns a judicial nomination into a morality play about motives, money, and legitimacy. The verb choices do the heavy lifting. “Spent months raising money” doesn’t just describe political organizing; it hints at something vaguely transactional, a suggestion that opposition is less principled than financed. “Take down” is even sharper: it imports the language of sabotage and character assassination, casting liberal advocacy groups as predators rather than participants in constitutional scrutiny.

Then comes the pivot: “they have not been able to touch judge Roberts.” “Touch” isn’t about votes; it’s about contamination. Roberts is presented as untarnishable, not merely qualified. Oxley isn’t arguing Roberts’s record so much as preempting any critique by treating criticism itself as proof of bad faith. If attacks fail to land, the nominee must be spotless; if attacks land, the attackers were always going to attack. Either way, the opposition loses.

The context is the early, high-stakes fight over George W. Bush’s judicial picks, when confirmation battles were becoming proxy wars over abortion, executive power, and the courts as a long-term policy engine. Oxley’s intent is to rally Republicans and moderates by offering an appealing narrative: that Roberts is so measured and “mainstream” that even a well-funded progressive apparatus can’t make a case against him. It’s less a defense of one judge than an attempt to delegitimize the entire ecosystem of organized dissent.