The Revenge of John Roberts

[Judi Lynn]

Andy Kroll 11 mins ago

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.

As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.

John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.

Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.

More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-revenge-of-john-roberts/ar-AALVK6k?li=BBnbfcL

[rso]

1. Roberts

Too bad, considering his major dressing down of Trump when Trump was insulting Judges, his siding with the liberals on a couple of major rulings, and his refusal to even entertain Donnie's Election fraud claims, Roberts could have been remembered as a generally good Chief Justice.

[madaboutharry]

2. I have a hard time understanding why a person

would be against voting rights. It is a strange passion, IMO.

[lastlib]

3. When dark people voting is an impediment to your power,

you stop them from voting. Power is all.

[lagomorph777]

4. Not strange at all if you are in the political minority and you want minority rule.

And if you have no morals.

[madaboutharry]

5. Roberts puts on a good act of portraying himself

as a decent man, but he is another phony who believes only a certain race and class of people should have a voice in democracy. He could have earned an honorable legacy. After Citizens United it became clear that he is another poster child for Maya Angelou’s famous quote “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”