With each passing day, we\'re learning a little more about the man President George W. Bush has nominated to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. We now know, for instance, that as a young lawyer in former President Ronald Reagan\'s Justice Department, John G. Roberts betrayed an abiding skepticism about affirmative action -- a posture that strikes one constitutional scholar, Cornell\'s Gary Simson, as strikingly similar to Robert Bork\'s. Bork\'s Supreme Court dreams ran aground on his own candor. But so far nothing has emerged to upset the conventional wisdom that Roberts will win confirmation by a comfortable majority in the U.S. Senate. Which begs a question: If Roberts is confirmed, will all the skirmishing over efforts to put an anti-affirmative action initiative before Michigan voters next year prove to have been beside the point? The whole idea behind the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, after all, is to nullify the 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan and its law school. If O\'Connor is replaced by someone more hostile to affirmative action, why shouldn\'t opponents of that policy sit tight and wait for the reconstituted court to reverse course?