Roberts!

President Bush surprised everyone by picking John Roberts of the D.C. Circuit as his first Supreme Court nominee. Roberts fits the Bush appointee mold: he's got a long history of service to the party, but is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Confirmation shouldn't be a problem for Roberts, though the Maxine Waters branch of the Democratic Party will probably whine about his white maleness.

Frankly, his white maleness might actually be a sign that Washington is arriving in the promised land of race irrelevance. Think about professional sports: race was once a big deal, and it took heroics by the likes of Robinson to achieve the irrelevance that athletes today take for granted. "I have a dream," he could have said, "that one day, black pitchers will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the speed of their fastball." Likewise, the goal of affirmative action and desegregation should not be to create some Lebanon-esque quota system, but to get to a point where people are valued for their minds and character (or at least for their connections and money), and race matters only as, say, state of origin does now.