Howard Bashman has announced the winner of his contest to identify the most dumb-ass question anyone could ask Judge John Roberts. The winng entry came from the “Unused and Probably Unusable” blog:

If you were Chief Justice of the Supreme Court along with John Souter, Terrence Thomas, Anthony Scalia, Nino Kennedy, Ruth Day O’Ginsberg, John Paul Jones, William Brennan, and your former boss Bill Rehnquist, and a case involving abortion and capital punishment came before you on an appeal from a panel upon which you sat, and you believed you would be committing a mortal sin by hearing the case but not deciding it, and you’d gone duck-hunting with counsel for appellants but the Founders and the French would agree with the other side, would you recuse yourself if your wife had signed but not been involved with drafting of one of the amicus briefs?

And the runner-up came from Cassandra of the “Villainous Company” blog:

Regarding your extremist and highly controversial decisions in Rancho Viejo v. Norton and Hedgepeth v. WMATA, the American people have a right to know:

If an endangered pregnant Southwestern arroyo toad were arrested for eating a single French Fry on the DC Metro while en route to obtain an illegal third trimester abortion, would your Catholic beliefs force you to recuse yourself from the case? Furthermore, would the fetus qualify as a protected class under the 14th Amendment, or would you apply rational basis review as you did in Hedgepeth, thereby condemning the hapless toad to a lengthy stay in the DC detention center and depriving the mother of the right to control her reproductive destiny?

Congratulations to the winners.