More on Roberts in the Reagan administration
The Washington Post reports: 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.
Just 26 when he joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was almost immediately entrusted to counsel senior department officials on such incendiary matters of the day as school desegregation, voting rules and government antidotes to bias in housing and hiring. ...
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." He argued in a memo to Starr that the House bill made sense only if "our laws were concerned with achieving equal results rather than equal opportunity."
The Senate eventually backed the House version after then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) added a brief passage stating that the revisions were not intended to mandate "proportional representation" by minorities -- a viewpoint that backers of the House bill had insisted was already clear. It is not apparent from the disclosures so far what position Roberts took on that amendment, which Reagan said he supported after Dole introduced it. -- A Charter Member of Reagan Vanguard