9-07-05, 9:08 am

In a weak effort to shift searing public critique of the Republican and Bush administration’s inadequate, incompetent, and racist response to the Katrina disaster, President Bush announced over the weekend that he was amending his nomination of John G. Roberts to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

This announcement shocked much of the civil rights and democratic rights community as revelations about Roberts’ views on women, civil rights, and the Bill of Rights have shown him to be a hard line conservative whose judicial activist career aims to roll back some of the most advanced and democratic laws, decisions, and practices won over the last 40 years.

Hearings that were scheduled to begin before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday (Sept. 6th) were postponed until next week.

Of Roberts’ proposed elevation to the powerful Chief Justice position, Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of labor unions and civil rights organizations, said, 'We need to ask ourselves whether John Roberts is the right person for this influential post. What we know of Roberts’ record raises warning flags on a number of important issues, including disturbing efforts to reshape civil rights policies such as court-ordered desegregation of public schools, as well as voting rights and Title IX implementation.'

On the specific question of Roberts’ views on civil rights, critics of his nomination have pointed to several key arguments he made as a member of the Reagan and previous Bush administrations.

As deputy Solicitor General, for example, Roberts argued against affirmative action policies based on the assumption that women and minority candidates for jobs, government contracts, and admission to universities were automatically 'inadequately prepared' while, presumably, white men were naturally more capable.

In other words, he presented his superiors with the old fallacy that white men are better, more intelligent candidates to receive government contracts, jobs, and admissions to universities.

This patently racist and sexist argument, the old standby of the anti-affirmative action right wing has no basis in reality or in law.

But racism is a central component of Roberts’ ideology masked as 'federalism' or states' rights, the traditional rationalization of the Jim Crow segregationists and pro-slave Southern elites – Roberts’ ideological predecessors.

As a minor figure in the Reagan administration, Roberts made something of a name for himself as an ultra-conservative pushing his superiors to hard line positions against civil rights measures. Roberts played an important role in an unsuccessful Reagan administration effort to make it harder to prove violations of the Voting Rights Act. And under the first Bush administration, he urged the administration to 'go slowly' on proposed fair housing legislation, claiming that such legislation represented 'government intrusion.'

Roberts was really arguing that segregation in housing is OK. He sought to block laws that would prevent landlords from excluding non-whites from their rental properties and keep real estate developers and lenders from continuing the widespread practice of racial red-lining.

Only hardcore racists and snobbish owners of properties in gated communities think these methods of maintaining segregation in housing are just and fair.

Bruce S. Gordon, president and CEO of the NAACP, the country’s oldest civil rights organization, expressed his organization’s dissatisfaction with Bush’s choice. 'While it comes as no surprise that the nominee’s views are different than ours,' Gordon stated, 'it is the seemingly extreme nature of those views, the degree of difference, that make his candidacy unacceptable. Roberts has demonstrated a commitment to reversing the historic civil rights gains of the past 40 years.'

In the arena of women’s rights, Roberts condemned efforts to eliminate the gender gap in wages as 'anticapitalist' and personally attacked advocates of laws that prescribed regulations for paying women for 'comparable worth,' or ensuring that women be compensated the same as men in comparable positions in other equally socially valuable occupations.

Put simply, Roberts argued that women aren’t worth receiving fair pay for fair work and that gender discrimination is fundamental to capitalism. He has also expressed the view that Roe v. Wade, a key legal decision that protects a woman’s privacy and her reproductive rights, 'was wrongly decided.'

What amounts to a sustained attack on the principle of gender equality by Roberts has been denounced by numerous women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW). In a statement released earlier this week, NOW President Kim Gandy described Bush’s elevation of Roberts’ nomination to the Chief Justice position as 'an outrage and an insult to the women of this country.'

Gandy criticized the decision based on what is known about Roberts’ attitude towards women, but also on the basis of what is not known. 'How dare Bush nominate this candidate,' Gandy wondered, 'for the top position on the Supreme Court when his administration has deliberately concealed hundreds of thousands of pages of his writings, during a time that he was one of the top lawyers representing the people of the United States? If the Bush administration refuses to release these papers, we must ask ourselves what they are hiding.'

Gandy further charged Bush with a lack of sensitivity at a difficult time by pressuring Congress to rush Roberts’ hearings. 'Bush’s lack of sensitivity has been on prominent display this past month as he avoided Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan and was stubbornly slow responding to the humanitarian crisis in New Orleans and Mississippi. With the South still in turmoil from Hurricane Katrina, Bush is pressuring the Senate to rush through this very important process and confirm John Roberts to a lifetime as Chief Justice while the country is looking the other way.'

Gandy further expressed dismay that Bush has failed to nominate a woman to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor, too, days after Bush announced his nomination of Roberts, criticized Bush for failing to nominate a woman.

Other proponents of the Constitution have pointed to Roberts’ disregard for the basic principle of the separation of church and state. One group of activists have launched to oppose the nomination of John Roberts for Chief Justice. The group launched their first television ad titled 'School Prayer' last week, which can be viewed at .

The ad focuses on John Roberts’s role in the 1991 Lee vs. Weisman case, and the ramifications of his confirmation on the future of the separation of church and state. The 'School Prayer' ad will be aired in selected markets around the country during the Senate confirmation hearings. is calling for a delay in the confirmation hearings and announced that it will not advertise or fundraise this week due to the relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

'Roberts’s actions in support of prayer in public schools once again demonstrates his disregard for our fundamental constitutional rights,' said Aaron Ament, a co-founder of .

In addition to a record on Constitutional matters that puts Roberts far outside the mainstream of public views on civil rights and Constitutional protections, Roberts recently lied about his membership in the arch-conservative Federalist Society.

After his nomination was announced last July, several prominent newspapers reported that Roberts had a been a member of that lawyers’ and judges’ association which has vowed to infiltrate the federal judiciary and actively overturn and strike down all manner of civil rights decisions from voting rights laws, to reproductive rights decisions, and laws that aim for women’s equality.

Roberts denied his membership in the Federalist Society and demanded that these newspapers retract their reports. Roberts understood that his membership in that ultra-right organization made him something less than a 'non-controversial' candidate.

Just a day after Roberts demanded the retraction, the Washington Post published a story describing a membership list of the Washington, DC chapter of the Federalist Society showing Roberts not only as a member, but also as holding a leadership position on the chapter’s steering committee.

Roberts’ lie was quickly dismissed by his handlers and ignored by the national media enamored with his good looks and charm.

But the people deserve more than a rubber stamp based on good looks. They don’t want to reduce the hearings to a beauty contest. That isn’t democracy.

Hurricane Katrina has shown, despite denials by the right-wing press, that racism still sharply divides our society and has cost the lives of thousands of people victimized by an administration that did not hold the Black and poor people of New Orleans in high enough regard to provide adequate funding to protect them from the deadly effects of that disaster.

Bush’s nomination of a person who is deeply enmeshed in the racist ideology of our segregationist past, the sexism that seeks to enforce social barriers to women’s advancement and to eliminate their right of self-determination over their bodies, and whose career as a right-wing judicial activist is barely just coming to light is not only the height of insensitivity but is also ideologically motivated cynicism that aims to tear the fabric of our Constitution to shreds.



--Contact Leo Walsh at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.