[Mb-civic] A Charter Member of Reagan Vanguard - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>A Charter Member of Reagan Vanguard
Court Nominee Was Part of Legal Team Seeking to Shift Course on Civil 
Rights Laws

By R. Jeffrey Smith, Amy Goldstein and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 1, 2005; Page A01

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.

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 -- who 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.

<>Roberts's record is being closely scrutinized, and Democrats on the 
Senate Judiciary Committee say they will rigorously question the Supreme 
Court nominee on his views of civil rights. A review of Roberts's papers 
from his time at the Justice Department and interviews with his 
contemporaries show he was deeply involved with the Reagan 
administration's efforts to recast the way government and the courts 
approached civil rights.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/31/AR2005073100696.html?nav=hcmodule 

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