[Mb-civic] Young Lawyer Roberts - Editorial - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>Young Lawyer Roberts

Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page B06

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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073001020.html?nav=hcmodule 

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