The NYT examines some of Judge Roberts files from the 80’s:
As a young lawyer in the Justice Department at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, John G. Roberts advocated judicial restraint on the issues of the day, many of which are still topical, documents released Tuesday by the National Archives show.
He defended, for instance, the constitutionality of proposed legislation to restrict the ability of federal courts to order busing to desegregate schools.
On other civil rights issues, he encouraged a cautious approach by courts and federal agencies in enforcing laws against discrimination.
Judge Roberts, now on the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, also argued that Congress had the constitutional power “to divest the lower federal courts of jurisdiction over school prayer cases.”
In another memorandum, he maintained that the Supreme Court, to which he is now nominated, overreached when it denied states the authority to impose residency requirements for welfare recipients.
This was an example, he wrote, of the court’s tendency to find fundamental rights, like the right to travel between states, for which there was no explicit basis in the Constitution. “It’s that very attitude which we are trying to resist,” he wrote.
Not much to the story, overall, but this was amusing:
In several memorandums, Judge Roberts displayed a shrewd understanding of how Washington works. Responding to a letter from the American Jewish Committee in 1981, he asked a supervisor, “Is this draft response O.K. – i.e., does it succeed in saying nothing at all?”
Again, a little bit of information, but not much. The Washington Post, on the other hand, provides a much more detailed account of his past positions:
Newly released documents show that John G. Roberts Jr. was a significant backstage player in the legal policy debates of the early Reagan administration, confidently debating older Justice Department officials and supplying them with arguments and information that they used to wage a bureaucratic struggle for the president’s agenda.
Roberts presented a defense of bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases; he argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, the landmark law that bars sex discrimination in intercollegiate athletic programs; and he even counseled his boss on how to tell the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow that the administration was cutting off federal funding for the Atlanta center that bears his name…
Much of Roberts’s time at the Justice Department was taken up by the debate over GOP-sponsored bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases. He wrote repeatedly in opposition to the view, advanced by then-Assistant Attorney General Theodore B. Olson, that the bills were unconstitutional. He scrawled “NO!” in the margins of an April 12, 1982, note Olson sent to Smith. In the memo, Olson observed that opposing the bills would “be perceived as a courageous and highly principled position, especially in the press.”
Roberts drew a bracket around the paragraph, underlined the words “especially in the press,” and wrote in the margin: “Real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow to the Tribes, Lewises and Brinks!”
The record is slowly being built…