The seriousness of the problem
August 2, 2005
The Washington Post has an excellent article out today detailing the activities of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts during his time at the Justice Department under the Reagan Administration.:
In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration’s effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination.
That’s pretty standard stuff for a Republican-run Justice Department, and nothing too shocking. Conservatives don’t like affirmative action. Neither do I, and in any event, its constitutional status isn’t settled and depends heavily on context and the facts of the individual case. But Roberts wasn’t only interested in going after debatable programs like affirmative action. He launched an attack on the Voting Rights Act. Yes, that Voting Rights Act, a cornerstone of President Johnson’s civil rights agenda.
Other memos by Roberts similarly argued for reining in the federal government’s role in civil rights disputes. They indicate, for example, that he was at the center of articulating and defending the administration’s policy that the Voting Rights Act — a seminal law passed in 1965 and up for renewal in 1982 — should in the future bar only voting rules that discriminate intentionally, rather than those that were shown to have a discriminatory effect.
After the House rejected administration concerns and passed a bill embracing the more broad “effects” standard in October 1981 by a vote of 389 to 24, Roberts wrote in a memo to Smith, “my own view is that something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem.”
Judge Roberts started out as the stealth candidate, the amiable face with an unknown record. Hopefully the Senate Judiciary Committee will use the confirmation hearings as a chance to take Mr. Roberts advice, and educate themselves and us on where John Roberts stands on the important issues of the day. As for myself, the more I learn, the less I like.