Roberts opposed 1982 change to Voting Rights Act
The Washington Post reports: THE THOUSANDS of pages of just-released government files involving Judge John G. Roberts Jr. offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Supreme Court nominee as a young lawyer. While it's dangerous to make judgments based on a quick and necessarily spotty reading of quarter-century-old documents, the picture that emerges from the first wave of papers, including a huge batch unveiled from Judge Roberts's tenure as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan's attorney general, shows a lawyer fully in tune with the staunchly conservative legal views of the administration he was serving -- and indeed, at times to the right of some of its leading conservative lawyers.
Those who fear or hope, depending on their political positions, that Judge Roberts might be a stealth nominee in the mold of Justice David H. Souter -- a supposed conservative whose performance on the bench turned out to be far more moderate than predicted -- will find no support for such predictions in the papers that have emerged so far.
The memos show a younger Mr. Roberts expressing hostility to affirmative action programs and to a broad application of the Voting Rights Act. Congress was rewriting the law, and Mr. Roberts was vocal about making certain that it apply only to practices that were intended to harm minority voters -- not to those that simply had the effect of doing so. He criticized the solicitor general's office for failing to "be sufficiently sensitive" to the administration's civil rights views. In one memorandum, Mr. Roberts recommended against having the Justice Department intervene in a sex discrimination case involving disparities in vocational training programs for male and female prisoners -- even though William Bradford Reynolds, the administration's staunchly conservative civil rights division chief, wanted to participate. One particular area of concern is Mr. Roberts's writings on the ability of state prisoners to have their claims heard in federal court, something that he argued the Constitution does not require. "The current availability of federal habeas corpus, particularly for state prisoners, goes far to making a mockery of the entire criminal justice system," Mr. Roberts wrote in a 1981 memorandum that foreshadowed the high court's subsequent moves to restrict state prisoners' appeals in federal courts. Some tightening was justified, but the high court and Congress have since gone too far in eroding meaningful review. -- Young Lawyer Roberts