Roberts Revealed as Anti-Judicial Radical

Devilstower

19 years ago

“Brilliant” Roberts. “Moderate” Roberts. “Fair” Roberts.

How about this Roberts. You know, the racist, anti-abortion advocate Roberts who moved to take down barriers between church and state and said that the the Supreme Court should not be able to get in the way of the radical right.
Just what did Roberts do?

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.

Hey, that sure sounds like a fair and balanced judge that America can get behind, huh? A man who advocated that the Supreme court should surrender it’s power to the other branches. A man who isn’t opposed to just Roe v. Wade, but from this description wants to overturn Marbury v. Madison.

As the documents come out, a very different picture of “fair” Roberts is emerging.

Roberts argued for restrictions on the rights of prisoners to litigate their grievances; depicted as “judicial activism” a lower court’s order requiring a sign-language interpreter for a hearing-impaired public school student who had already been given a hearing aid and tutors; and argued for wider latitude for prosecutors and the police to question suspects out of the presence of their attorneys.

When Republican bills were floated in Reagan days that would have taken power away from the Supreme Court on the most crucial social issues, even Reagan’s attorney general disagreed. But Roberts was all for stripping the court of its power and ushering in the theocracy.

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 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 the Tribes, Lewises and Brinks!”

Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of man we want to have a lifetime appointment to the court. Opinions like these make Scalia look moderate. In fact, these opinions go beyond left or right — Roberts is a radical advocate of destroying the third branch of the government. Putting him on the supreme court makes about as much sense as making a termite on the board of a lumber company.

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