The Washington Post has a long piece on Supreme Court Nomimee John Roberts role in trying to limit bias laws during his days in the Reagan Justice Department:
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.None of this should be a surprise really. It does show this guy is a true believer. And, clearly, he has been groomed for years. It's like the GOP has a judicial pipeline. They started preparing Roberts for the Supreme Court back when he was 26. He proved his mettle, then they kept him around...waiting for the chance.
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.
In prolific missives of a few pages and densely-written 30-page legal memos, Roberts -- whose co-workers recall had primary responsibility for civil rights matters in his office -- consistently sought to bolster the legal reasoning for the administration's new stances and to burnish its presentation of the policies to Congress and the public.
My really favorite part of the article was learning about his strong opposition to Title IX:
Roberts's writings also show that he favored another pillar of the administration's new civil rights policies in education: an effort to limit the use of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which allows the government to withhold federal aid from schools that discriminate against women. Until then, Title IX had been interpreted to mean that all of a school's funding could be cut off if it discriminated at all, but Reagan officials rewrote the rules so that only the specific program found guilty of discrimination would lose money -- an interpretation that Congress later overruled.Read the whole article. When you're finished, you can't think for a minute that Roe v. Wade stands a chance with this guy. And if Roe goes, a whole lot of privacy rights go with it.
His second summer working for the attorney general, Roberts wrote Smith a memo on this topic, urging that the administration stand behind a lower court decision siding with the University of Richmond in a case brought by the U.S. Department of Education for alleged sex discrimination in its sports programs.
"I strongly agree with [the] recommendation not to appeal" the court's decision that the university did not have to turn over athletic records to the government because its intercollegiate sports received no federal aid, Roberts wrote. "Under Title IX, federal investigators cannot rummage willy-nilly through institutions, but can only go as far as the federal funds go."
