Top Court Nominee Supported Reagan Policies
Yahoo! News, Reuters
By James Vicini
Tuesday, 2 August 2005, 3:01 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As a young aide to Attorney General William French Smith in the early 1980s, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts embraced the conservative Reagan administration's efforts to limit judicial power and certain civil rights remedies, according to memos released on Tuesday.
The documents, made available by the National Archives, showed how Roberts repeatedly advised Smith to emphasize the efforts on judicial restraint -- a philosophy that recognizes judges have limited authority in deciding cases.
In one memo dated Jan. 27, 1982, Roberts urged Smith to raise the issue with a conservative journalist. He called the department's approach the "first serious effort to do something about what conservatives have been saying about the courts." "It's already having an impact," he wrote in citing a case the administration had won before the Supreme Court.
In another memo preparing Smith for an interview with a newspaper reporter, Roberts wrote that the administration's efforts and the appointment of judges who recognized the limited nature of their role "directly affects the average citizen by limiting the intrusion of the courts on his daily life."
Roberts also emphasized the changes in civil rights remedies used by the Reagan administration. "We no longer demand busing, so disruptive to the education of our children, or quotas, which have been so divisive in the workforce."
Both the busing of minority children into better school districts and the hiring quotas were put in place by U.S. courts to try to remedy racial discrimination.
President Bush last month nominated Roberts, a U.S. appeals court judge, to replace departing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative who often cast the decisive vote on the closely divided court on such issues as affirmative action programs to help minorities.
The White House has agreed to make available to the Senate Judiciary Committee documents involving Roberts when he was a Justice Department aide and then in the White House counsel's office during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
But the White House has refused to release internal documents written when Roberts was deputy solicitor general at the Justice Department in the early 1990s in the first Bush administration.
The National Archives last week released about 15,000 pages of his office files from 1981 and 1982. It made available on Tuesday an additional 350 pages consisting of his memos and other materials.
The latest documents include a draft article on judicial restraint edited by Roberts and submitted by Smith for The Washington Post's editorial pages.
The editorial page editor, Meg Greenfield, thanked him for the article, but said the newspaper would not be using it.
In 1981, Roberts prepared a memo for Smith entitled "judicial activism Q & As."
One example he cited was a Supreme Court ruling that "relied upon the so-called 'fundamental right to travel' to strike down state laws imposing a one-year residency requirement before individuals could apply for welfare benefits."
A memo on Aug. 5, 1982, summarized a meeting of Roberts and other officials aimed at countering complaints by critics that the Justice Department had "turned back the clock" on civil rights enforcement.
The group agreed to take various steps. Roberts was assigned to draft for Smith an article for the editorial pages of newspapers on the administration's civil rights record.
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