(This is the third in a series of posts highlighting interesting things we find as we review the publicly-available documents from John Roberts’s early years in the Reagan Administration. The first post, “Does Roberts really respect precedent?,” is here, and the second one, “John Roberts on fair pay for women" is here.)
One of the questions that arises from John Roberts’s record in the Justice Department is how much the documents he wrote reflected his own views, as opposed to those of his bosses. An interesting newspaper article that was in Roberts’s own files suggests that Roberts played an important role in influencing Department of Justice policies on civil rights enforcement in the early 1980s.
The undated article, “Rebellion flares anew at Justice Dept.,” which is labeled at the top, “Boston Globe,” discusses the fact that some 100 Justice Department lawyers were “openly rebelling over what they perceive as the Reagan Administration’s general retreat from strong enforcement of federal civil rights laws.” For example, the article said, over 200 civil rights division employees made public a letter they had sent to William Bradford Reynolds, the head of the Department’s civil rights division, charging that the decision to grant tax exemptions to segregationist private schools “violates existing federal civil rights laws.” Other areas of concern the article cited were housing discrimination, school desegregation, affirmative action, and voting rights.
The article reports that the dissatisfied lawyers believed John Roberts was one of the people influencing the Justice Department’s controversial civil rights policies:
"They say Justice Department positions are influenced by two former Rehnquist clerks: Charles Cooper, special assistant to Reynolds, and John Roberts, special assistant to the Attorney General."
During Roberts’s confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit, he told Senators that they should not assume that his personal views were the same as the arguments he made on behalf of the Administration he worked for. This article indicates that Roberts himself bears some responsibility for controversial civil rights positions taken by the Justice Department in the Reagan Administration – a good area of inquiry for his confirmation hearing.
