WASHINGTON – As a young assistant to the attorney general 25 years ago, John Roberts pressed for conservative revisions in then-liberal government policy, attacking affirmative action and recommending fewer restrictions on law enforcement.
In one example, a 1981 memo to his boss, Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts sharply criticized affirmative action for its “failure” caused by “inherent flaws,” and dismissed a 1981 Civil Rights Commission report on it as “circular logic.”
Yet, Roberts, then 26, also showed a pragmatic side, seeking to thread his way in some memos between the disagreements of some of the big legal guns in the Justice Department, including the powerful head of the Civil Rights Division, William Bradford Reynolds, and the legal counsel, Theodore Olson.
That is the picture that emerges of Roberts, now a nominee for the Supreme Court, from 18,000 pages of documents from when he served as a special assistant to Smith between September 1981 and November 1982.
A sampling of the files, however, found no smoking gun to derail the nomination.
Made public Tuesday afternoon, the files are among 62,000 pages to be made available covering Roberts’ time at the Justice Department and four years from 1982-86 as associate White House counsel.
The White House, however, drew the line at releasing memos from 1989 to 1993 in which Roberts served as principal deputy solicitor general, arguing the government’s position before the Supreme Court.
The action provoked complaints from Democrats and liberal groups, which insist on seeing memos to clarify Roberts’ personal views on issues such as abortion, because in 1991 one of his briefs urged the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The bulk of the material released was about the futile early Reagan administration debate over joining congressional conservatives in their campaign to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court on social issues such as school prayer.
Roberts jumped on that bandwagon, the materials suggest, disagreeing with Olson, who urged President Reagan to show courage by refusing to limit the courts. On a copy of Olson’s memo, Roberts wrote by hand “real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow” to legal academia.
And Roberts came across as a true believer in judicial restraint, praising one Supreme Court decision for overturning a judge who ruled on an issue not before the court in the case he was deciding. Ironically, Roberts later would do the same thing as deputy solicitor general, arguing to overturn Roe, an issue not then before the court.
In a Sept. 16, 1981, memo, Roberts exhibited his skepticism of liberal anti-crime efforts, criticizing the Center for Non-Violent Social Change, run by Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader, and its use of a $149,560 federal grant.
Saying the funds came from political connections, Roberts called King’s operation a “poorly run program” and counseled the attorney general to avoid discussing that but to refrain from offering new funds.
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