Today's Washington Post investigates Judge Roberts and his abysmal record on civil rights. During the Reagan years, he actively worked with the Reagan administration to gut various civil rights laws and favored laws saying that courts could not rule on various civil rights issues.
This is all part and parcel of his incoherence when it comes to understanding Constitutional issues. A good judge should reflect neither the views of the Democratic or Republican parties, but should reflect the views of the Constitution as it applies to today. However, Judge Roberts' writings reflected partisan political attacks on long-established civil rights gains.
Here are some of the things he did:
He wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, that would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged arguments by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in favor of busing and affirmative action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing "damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases.
All of which raises an important question that senators should ask Roberts -- When is it OK for the government to intervene in the name of civil rights? If he were President, would he weaken the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Would he have ruled in favor of Brown vs. Board of Education?
When I read this article, I get the feeling that if Roberts had been in charge, we would never have seen many of the gains in civil rights that we saw during the 1950's and 1960's. Would he have argued that the Supreme Court should not be able to rule on cases such as Brown? Would he have complained that civil rights agitators were disrupting the Southern way of life?
And Roberts, like many of our right-wing trolls, plays the victim when challenged or criticized:
These policies provoked substantial controversy when applied to civil rights. The Washington Council of Lawyers, a nonpartisan group that included some government lawyers, said in a September 1982 report that the Justice Department had "retreated from well-established . . . policies," disregarded principles embraced by the courts and Congress, and created new legal precedents that impeded minority rights in employment, housing, voting and education.
But Roberts denied in memos written at the time that what he called the "critics" were correct about the administration's lax enforcement, and he also complained bitterly in a statement drafted for Smith about the "disingenuous accusations of those who, for political reasons, seek to cloud rational discussion with false charges of racism."
This is an excellent opportunity for Roberts to set the record straight. If he can prove that in fact the administration aggressively enforced civil rights laws, then let him come up with 15 instances of such aggressive enforcement in which he was actively involved. If he fails to do so, then he is acting like a spoiled brat.
However, from the record, here are numerous instances in which he actively sought to gut civil rights protections:
--In August, 1981, Roberts wrote a memo in opposition to busing and affirmative action, referring to their "purported need."
--Roberts favored the firing of civil rights advocates within the justice department and their replacement by "people who agree with our anti-busing and anti-quota principles."
--In a late 1981 case in Atlanta, Roberts chastised two lower-ranking lawyers for advising two school districts to offer jobs and back pay to applicants who believed they were discriminated against.
--Roberts was the main person behind the Reagan administration's argument that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should only apply to intentional discrimination and not to policies which had a discriminatory effect. These views were broadly rejected, as the House renewed the act by a vote of 389-24.
--In another opinion overruled by Congress, Roberts believed that only specific programs found guilty of discrimination against women, and not the whole schools, as required by law, were subject to Title IX.
--Roberts actively sought to quash efforts to search records of schools to determine if Title IX discrimination had occured.
--In a Kentucky prison discrimination case, Roberts argued that it was too expensive to provide equal opportunities for male and female prisoners.
Throughout this article, Roberts has shown a consistent record of seeking to roll back protections for women and minorities. By contrast, he never once intervened to expand protections. The question becomes, what protections for women and minorities, if any, does he really believe the government should keep?