Posted on 07/28/2005 5:51:10 PM PDT by rwa265
AS A BRASH, 20-SOMETHING LAWYER in the Reagan administration, John G. Roberts Jr. was a conservative's conservative, urging fellow Reaganites to more faithfully pursue a conservative agenda.
Documents from Mr. Roberts' days in the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office in the early 1980s raise questions about the U.S. Supreme Court nominee's commitment to the role of the federal courts in protecting religious freedom, abortion rights and equality.
Mr. Roberts was a 27-year-old special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith at a time when the Reagan administration was working to reverse long-standing civil rights policies. Mr. Roberts wanted to step on the accelerator.
Mr. Roberts upbraided his superiors for failing to support a Texas law cutting off public education to the children of illegal immigrants. A 1982 ruling by the Supreme Court said the law was unconstitutional. Mr. Roberts said that the Justice Department should have argued for "judicial restraint."
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Looks like President Bush has struck gold with Judge Roberts.
The new definition of "civil rights": anything that a conservative opposes that is a part of the liberal agenda of racial preferences and easy criminal penalties.
Oh, it didn't take long, did it? First attack on Roberts in the press.
Good point. I think the left has played this card 100 too many times and the public is immune to this meaningless rhetoric. 30 year old playbook. I hope they keep using it.
If he is a normal American, as we here all hope, he must had developed some great coping skills. After all, he did very well as an undergraduate and law school student at Harvard. Harvard is a place where faculty get special credit for forcing out non-leftist extremists.
Oh sure, this'll hurt Roberts. His favorable for the court will go from 56-25 to 80-20 after Americans hear he's serious about treating illegals as illegals.
I am just waiting for the moonbats to pop up with some photo-shopped picture of little John Roberts wearing a Hitler Youth uniform.
I hope more and more stories come out about this guy like this.
Pretty soon they will be holding him to a "religious test," like the kind specifically prohibited by the Constitution.
Sounds like my kind of Justice.
I hope that lots of FReepers get the opportunity to read it.
From the editorial:
Mr. Roberts also took on Theodore Olson, a top Justice official at the time. Mr. Roberts wanted to support a bill championed by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction in cases involving school prayer, school desegregation and abortion.
Mr. Olson thought the Thurmond bill might be unconstitutional because it eliminated a way to remedy school segregation.
But Mr. Roberts argued that the Thurmond bill actually would help desegregate schools. In a bit of sophistry that turned the Constitution's promise of equality upside down, he claimed that "busing promotes segregation rather than remedying it, by precipitating white flight."
This is only one issue, of course, and an old opinion by the future Justice, but of importance in his willingness to state the obvious, which so many either ignore or try to distort. Of course busing precipitated white flight. And, though busing has, in theory at least, been eliminated by the courts, it persists in the form of careful balancing of "high poverty" or "low achieving" students throughout urban school systems, and white flight has, if anything, been accelerated.
Or, perhaps we should call it "smart flight," because middle and upper black families, too, are beginning to move to the burbs. And the cataclysmic failure of urban school systems, including a "share the misery" program guaranteed to finish off whatever high-quality urban schools may have existed, is a big reason.
Judge Roberts (even at an early age, before he was a judge) was not afraid to ignore political correctness, and state the painful truth. I am increasingly impressed with the President's choice.
"The linked article is excellent -- not, of course, in the sense that I agree with the editorial opinion, but rather that my enthusiasm for the nominee is reinforced by the very things that the Post-Dispatch views with alarm."
That's exactly what happened to me. The more I was reading it, the more I thought, "hey, this guy is really good!"
I especially liked his note, "Real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow (to the media and academics)." I truly hope he still feels that way.
Did Reagan reverse civil rights?
I don't remember that.
How could abiding by our Constitution reverse anyone's rights?
Poor Roberts, he actually thinks the Constitution means what it says
Someone needs to ask Roberts about Globalization and the One World Government. Does he support this?
No one has asked this most important question that I have seen.
The point where I stopped reading the article.
Amen
Sounds like a judge who would understand this:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/healy1.html
about the amendment that gave birth to liberalism.
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