[Mb-civic] Questions For John Roberts - Deborah Ellis - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Questions For John Roberts

By Deborah Ellis
Wednesday, August 17, 2005; Page A13

The furor over the recent NARAL Pro-Choice America ad about John Roberts 
and abortion clinics is unfortunate in that it obscures an important 
issue that raises serious questions: John Roberts's role as deputy 
solicitor general in the court case Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health 
Clinic. In that case, Roberts argued on the side of Operation Rescue for 
a narrow interpretation of one of our nation's civil rights laws.

The case was not about clinic bombings, lawful protest outside abortion 
clinics or even abortion rights. As Justice John Paul Stevens said in 
his 1993 dissenting opinion, the case was "about the exercise of Federal 
power to control an interstate conspiracy to commit illegal acts."

Why were these cases necessary? For a decade leading up to 1993, 
Operation Rescue and other national groups organized massive human 
blockades to forcibly prevent women from entering abortion clinics. This 
was a strategy designed to overwhelm small police forces so the 
blockaders could not be arrested. I argued in the Supreme Court on 
behalf of women's health clinics and female patients in the Bray case. 
We used a Reconstruction-era civil rights law to obtain protection from 
federal marshals so women could safely enter abortion clinics. The 1871 
law was enacted for exactly this purpose: to prevent mobs from 
conspiring to take away the civil rights of newly freed slaves.

In the summer of 1991, during a particularly large blockade in Wichita, 
John Roberts went on national television to defend the government's 
decision under President George H.W. Bush to file a friend-of-the-court 
brief on the side of Operation Rescue. That brief asked a federal court 
to stay implementation of an injunction against the blockades that had 
already been issued. In contrast to Little Rock in 1957, when federal 
marshals protected African American children trying to integrate 
schools, Roberts argued that women should be left to whatever protection 
the states could provide, however inadequate.

To be fair, in Roberts's Supreme Court argument he pointed out that the 
Justice Department was defending the proper interpretation of the 1871 
law, not Operation Rescue's unlawful conduct. But no courtroom caveat 
can erase the impact of the federal government's lending its weight on 
the side of the mob intent on stopping women from exercising a 
constitutional right. It was a devastating blow.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/16/AR2005081601178.html?nav=hcmodule

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