About twenty minutes before President Bush announced that John G. Roberts, Jr., was his choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, he telephoned Harry Reid, of Nevada, the Senate Minority Leader. As Reid recalls the brief conversation, Bush said, “This guy is really smart, and you’ll like him.” Reid replied, “I hope so,” and added that, during the search, he had enjoyed working with the White House legal counsel, Harriet Miers. (A few days earlier, Reid had met with Miers and had suggested ways to avoid a divisive confirmation process.) Mentioning her name, Reid said, was a signal—his way of telling Bush, “Thanks for not giving us any of these crazies.” Or, as he put it a little later, the President “didn’t give us somebody who people like me were jumping up and down screaming the first time the name was uttered.”

Reid has been the Democrats’ leader in the Senate for six months. He is sixty-five, a trim man with short, graying hair and slightly stooped shoulders, and not someone who appears likely to jump up and down screaming. When we met last week in his Capitol office, it was clear that the Roberts nomination had come as a relief. “There were lots of people we didn’t want, and I made sure he knew what those names were,” Reid said, and mentioned the federal judges Edith Jones and Janice Rogers Brown, among others. “I think the President submitted someone who he thinks won’t be much trouble.” Nonetheless, Reid was reserving judgment until the F.B.I. investigation and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were completed. “Roberts is not a slam dunk,” he said. “I’m just keeping, as some have heard me say, my powder dry until we find out what the deal is.” And yet he couldn’t quite conceal his pleasure.

The day after Bush made his choice public, Roberts went to Capitol Hill to meet with some of the senators who will eventually be asked to vote on his confirmation. Reid, who is a former trial lawyer, spent thirty minutes with Roberts. One thing he asked him was how he felt about Supreme Court precedents—in particular, on what grounds they might be overturned. “Precedent is so important to me in the law,” Reid told him.

Roberts, Reid recalled, said, “ ‘Oh, on the Supreme Court you can change precedent only if there’s this and this,’ and he was rattling them off. I hope I didn’t act surprised, but I’d never heard anything like that before.” Roberts, in Reid’s view, left no doubt that he would be very reluctant to overturn precedents. To do so, Roberts had said, the Court would first have to consider a series of objective criteria, two of which stood out: whether a precedent fostered stability in the nation; and the extent to which society had come to rely on an earlier ruling, even a dubious one. “I thought it would be more of a weaselly answer than that, but he said you have to meet all these standards before you can change a precedent,” Reid said. Roberts’s view of precedent is likely to be an important issue during the upcoming confirmation hearings. Earl Maltz, a conservative and a professor at the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, says that what Roberts told Reid could be “very significant,” because it runs counter to the “originalist” approach of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who believe that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted, according to the original intent of the Founding Fathers; on that premise, some previously decided cases, including Roe v. Wade, would be ripe for overturning. “The Constitution is not a living organism,” Scalia has said.

The other important part of their conversation, as Reid recounted it, had to do with an environmental case that Roberts had successfully argued before the Supreme Court in 2002—“one of the biggest environmental victories in decades,” Reid said. As a private attorney, Roberts had represented the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which had been sued for imposing a building moratorium in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Under questioning by the Justices, Roberts had cited the potential for “irreparable harm” to the lake, and at one point said, “A temporary ban on development doesn’t render property valueless.” The environment is one of Reid’s causes, and what impressed Reid was that Roberts’s argument had been reasoned, not doctrinaire—“He based it on the facts.” Reid felt that the case demonstrated Roberts’s ability to grasp both sides of a debate.

Reid more than once compared Roberts to Justice David Souter, who was appointed by the first President Bush, in 1990, and today is widely detested by conservatives because he frequently sides with the more liberal Justices. Souter and Reid are friendly. “He’s my favorite man on the Court,” Reid said. “I think he’s such a wonderful man, and he believes in precedent. That’s all he’s doing. He’s just following the law.” Reid smiled, and continued, “If somebody is a real lawyer and not a Clarence Thomas or Edith Jones, who is there not to be a judge but to be a legislator, it gives us some hope, and so, if he is approved, I would hope he would turn out like Souter or somebody like that.” There is, to be sure, little in Roberts’s early record to suggest that he is anything but a conservative. A Washington Post report last week, for instance, quoted documents suggesting that Roberts had been an aggressive advocate of Ronald Reagan’s agenda when he served as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.

Reid, though, believes that Bush chose Roberts in a moment of political weakness. Two months earlier, the Democrats had been successful in beating back the so-called “nuclear option”—Senator Trent Lott’s infelicitous name for the Republican attempt to change long-standing Senate rules on the filibuster. That issue had occupied the Senate for months, and for good reason: Republicans have a ten-vote advantage in the hundred-member Senate, but it requires sixty votes to stop a filibuster; the Republican leadership wanted to change that to a simple majority of fifty-one votes, which would have made it almost impossible for the Democrats to block a controversial Supreme Court nomination. “I don’t want to stick my finger in his eye, at this stage,” Reid said, speaking of Bush. “I’m trying, in a nice way, to say I think everyone’s experience here with the nuclear option has made everyone, including the President, more cautious about judges, because, as it turned out, we spent a third of the Senate’s time so far this year basically on it.” The filibuster issue was finally resolved by means of a complex bargain worked out by a group of centrist Republicans and Democrats, who became known as the Gang of Fourteen. In the end, the filibuster was preserved. The result was widely seen as a victory for Reid and a setback for his counterpart, Majority Leader Bill Frist, of Tennessee.

After that, Reid said, Bush “just didn’t need another fight.” He added, “He’s had plenty.” He pointed to a drop in Bush’s approval rating, and cited a recent Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll in which only forty-one per cent of the respondents said they believed that Bush was honest and straightforward. Reid attributed the President’s declining popularity to bad news from Iraq, the investigation into whether his key political adviser, Karl Rove, leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. agent, and his proposal, now faltering, to privatize part of Social Security. “He’s always been king of the hill,” Reid said. “His numbers have been good, but they’re not good now.” Reid also thought that Bush had come to have a different view of him. “I just don’t think he estimated me at all—under or over.” Now, Reid said, “I think he understands me a little bit more than he used to.”