With an article linked by the headline, Roberts Backed Limits on Bias, The Washington Post looks to be goading the Democrats into a filibuster. The Post implies that John G. Roberts was on the wrong side on civil rights issues when he first worked in the Reagan administration -- that being the side of Ronald Reagan.
In August 1981, less than a month after Roberts started working at Justice, he wrote a memo for the attorney general about a meeting that Arthur S. Flemming, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, had requested to discuss what Roberts called "the purported need for race-conscious remedies such as busing and affirmative action."
In the memo, Roberts derided a report Flemming had passed along from his own staff, laying out the commission's reasons for favoring such strategies. Roberts wrote that the report "is subject to serious criticism" and advised the attorney general: "If a meeting is held with Mr. Flemming, a strong response to his view of civil rights enforcement could be made."
Flemming was dismissed by Reagan in 1982 and replaced by Clarence Pendleton, whom Roberts praised in a July 7 memo to Smith that year, noting that he "generally agrees with our anti-busing and anti-quota principles."
Feminists will no doubt be on board with it, as well.
Roberts's writings also show that he favored another pillar of the administration's new civil rights policies in education: an effort to limit the use of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which allows the government to withhold federal aid from schools that discriminate against women. Until then, Title IX had been interpreted to mean that all of a school's funding could be cut off if it discriminated at all, but Reagan officials rewrote the rules so that only the specific program found guilty of discrimination would lose money -- an interpretation that Congress later overruled.
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