Judge Roberts Listed In Right-wing Directory

By George E. CurryNNPA Editor-in-Chief WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Judge John G. Roberts, the president’s nominee to fill the recent Supreme Court vacancy, is listed in the directory of the Federalist Society despite denials that he had ever belonged to the Right-wing network of law students, professors, lawyers and judges. When it was initially reported that Roberts was a member of the group, either he or his representatives denied any ties to the Federalist Society and demanded a correction. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and USA Today all printed retractions. However, the Washington Post disclosed Monday that it had found documentation that Roberts was a member of the group. “Over the weekend, The Post obtained a copy of the Federalist Society Lawyers’ Division Leadership Directory, 1997-1998,” the newspaper reported. “It lists Roberts, then a partner at the law firm Hogan & Hartson, as a member of the steering committee of the organization’s Washington chapter and includes his firm’s address and telephone number.” Although Roberts has acknowledged taking parts in Federalist Society activities, he had denied being a member of the group. A White House spokesperson said Roberts “has no recollection of being a member of the Federalist Society, or its steering committee.” The disclosure of Roberts’ ties to the Federalist Society is expected to raise questions about his veracity and end his campaign as a stealth conservative. While there is nothing illegal or wrong with being a member of the group, it provides a clearer picture of his views and ends, once and for all, the likelihood of his being a Sandra Day O’Conner-like conservative in disguise. On the group’s Web site, it notes: “Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order.” The 25,000-member organization notes at another point that it foster debate on, “…The role of the courts in saying what the law is rather than what they wish it to be.” The idea that beginning in law school, conservatives are part of a large, influential networks that leads to clerkships with conservative judges, contact with conservative lawyers, court appointments and access to powerful national figures. Many of Bush’s judicial appointments have been members of the Federalist Society. Past targets of the Federalist Society have included the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court ruling that provides certain basic protections for suspected criminals and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Four of the nine Supreme Court justices – William H. Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy – have close ties to the Federalist Society. Its board of trustees has included Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah); former attorney general Ed Meese; Willam Bradford Reynolds, assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration and C. Boyden Gray, the elder President Bush’s former chief of staff and the key supporter of Judge Roberts. Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told Emerge magazine in 1999: “This is more than an attack on affirmative action being spearheaded by the Federalist Society lawyers. They want to go beyond getting rid of affirmative action. They want to go back to Brown v. Board of Education.” He explained, “We have Justice Antonin Scalia [who advised the Federalist Society at its inception and hired two of its three founders as his law clerks], who two years ago gave a public lecture at Columbia Law School where he stated if Brown v. Board of Education was to be presented to him today, he would rule against the plaintiff. In other words, this was a threat that if Brown v. Board of Education was voted on before the Supreme Court, he would overturn it.” In his book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover Up, former prosecutor Lawrence Walls writes, “In calling for the narrow construction of constitutional grants of governmental power, the Federalist Society seemed to speak for right-wing Republicans. I was especially troubled that one of White House counsel Boyden Gray’s assistants had openly declared that no one who was not a member of the Federalist Society had received a judicial appointment from President [George H.W.] Bush.”