We have a team of over 10 lawyers here at Alliance for Justice, and for the past several weeks, they have been poring over documents, briefs, statements, memos and countless other documents to get an understanding of John Roberts’ views on the law. What we (okay, they) uncovered, was not reassuring. So, after extensive research, fact checking and re-checking, Alliance for Justice has decided to oppose John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court. We have the report for you—105 pages of fun. Beach reading for your Labor Day weekend.

Honestly, though, this is a thorough and comprehensive look at the Roberts record we know about. We may be a bit biased since it is our report, but we think this is required reading for those who really want to educate themselves about John Roberts’ record.

UPDATE... if you'd like to catch the press conference again, it will be rebroadcast at 5:30 PM EDT on C-SPAN 2.

Join us next week for a fresh helping of the Insider Scoop and, of course, the next podcast. Have a great weekend...

Apparently, people debate the use of Astroturf in sports. Some of us here at the Scoop have a better idea about this than others. We all know, however, that there is no substituting genuine engagement by people in the political process.

Other groups seems to be taking a dimmer view of this. In the past two days, we’ve seen support for John Roberts from “Women for Roberts� and “Project 21,� an organization calling itself a civil rights group. Funny thing. Both of these events were sponsored by Creative Response Concepts. They sound like a PR firm because they are a PR firm… A highly partisan PR firm behind such fun forays into truth and high-minded debate like the Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth.� They are engaging in something called astroturfing—trying to create the illusion of grassroots support where none exists.

CRC has a history with the Bush administration, and these events showing “genuine� support for Roberts are nothing more than a part of the carefully-choreographed White House script for the Roberts nomination.

Roberts’ record shows high troubling stances on women’s rights and civil rights. But the spokespeople for Creative Response Concepts didn’t want to go into that. So, we did it for them. Find out who CRC really is and what Roberts’ record looks like in terms of women’s and civil rights.

For a federal judge and highly-educated lawyer, John Roberts doesn’t seem to have the best grasp of the whole “checks and balances� thing. (Maybe a refresher would be helpful.)

He seems to have almost a ranked order for our branches of goverment… Executive over Congress, Congress over the courts. Recently-released documents indicate that Roberts holds an expansive view of presidential power-—memos indicate he believed that the president should be able to wage war “without the interference of Congress,� and also strongly supported presidential recess appointments in the face of Congressional opposition.

That is not to say that Congress gets left out in the cold in Roberts’ hierarchy. No, no. Roberts was a staunch advocate of court-stripping. And not the fun page-99-of-America-the-Book kind of way, either. Roberts felt that it was perfectly reasonable to limit the courts’ jurisdiction over certain (politicized) issues like choice and desegregation. (He did admit it may not be the smartest choice politically, constitutionality issues aside.)

So, in John Roberts’ eyes, it would seem that while the branches of government are separate, they are certainly not equal.

Hope everyone had a good weekend. We at The Scoop woke up to an article in The Washington Post that reminded us why we are continuing to have that uneasy feeling about one John Roberts. Set aside political philosophy for a moment and consider the structure of government. The judiciary stands as the only means for an individual to get a hearing on the law when there has been some sort of harm, whether that harm came from an individual, a corporation, or the government. It is a bedrock principle of our democracy.

So why has John Roberts wanted to limit Americans' ability to protect their rights? The Post article describes the movement amongst conservatives to limit access to federal courts by restricting technicalities for admission like "standing" (limits on the person able to make a claim) and "justiciability" (limits on the powers a court has to hear a claim). It should come as no surprise that Roberts has been wanting to jack up the limits on both of these since he was a young attorney in the Reagan administration. So, even if Congress passes laws to protect civil rights and the environment, they are rendered completely useless because there is no place to go.

And John Roberts is perfectly ok with that.

Ahh, but we digress. This week on the podcast... more on the continuing revelations from the docs we do have... another segment of Meet John Roberts, and, of course, a brand new Magic 8 Ball. There might be a couple of shows this week, so keep your podcatchers tuned into the feed!

It’s a Document Day! Trees have been killed, hundreds of thousands of copies have been made, the press, lawyers and researchers are rushing to get their copies—just like the release of the latest Harry Potter. Well, not really, but this is what passes for excitement in Washington during August.

What will be found in the documents? (And will documents be found? Certain memos Roberts wrote on affirmative action, Bob Jones University and presidential pardons are MIA right now.) What we’ve come across so far doesn’t exactly inspire us to jump for joy. We are willing to hazard a guess that the new documents won’t provide much reassurance regarding John Roberts’ commitment to individual rights. Even Ed Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with us. “Those who try to paint Judge Roberts as a squishy moderate will not find any supporting evidence in these documents.� Well, we certainly haven’t seen any signs of moderation, squishy or otherwise, so far.

In a statement, Reid said “all this talk about whether Democrats will support the Roberts nomination is laughably premature. The hearings have not even begun. The White House has so far refused to produce relevant documents, and the documents we have seen raise questions about the nominee's commitment to progress on civil rights.

Senators Kennedy and Leahy also quickly offered rejoinders. Senator Leahy, in particular, is vehement, saying that Roberts’ views were "among the most radical being offered by a cadre intent on reversing decades of policies on civil rights, voting rights, women's rights, privacy and access to justice."

So, the Senate isn’t backing down or rolling over or whatever other language people are using. It is taking time and deliberating, and taking the steps to ensure it has the information it needs—despite the blocks being thrown up by the White House—to make an informed decision.

More documents = more red flags. Yesterday’s release of over 5,000 documents from the Reagan Library – and the withholding of several hundred – has raised more concerns about what we’re learning and what we still don’t know about Judge Roberts.

As reported in the Washington Post, Roberts slammed three Republican House Members, including current Senator Olympia Snowe, for supporting a principle guaranteeing equal pay for different jobs deemed to have comparable worth, calling it a “radical redistributive concept,� and comparing it, in the Post’s words, to “Marxist dogma.� Roberts also signed off on a presidential telegram that invoked the Gettysburg Address and the legal principle of Plessy v. Ferguson (that African-Americans were not considered “persons� for the purposes of the U.S. Constitution) as analogs to legalized abortion. The Postalso reports that, on the church-state front, Roberts wrote that a Supreme Court decision barring a moment of silence for prayer in schools “seems indefensible.�

The removal of 478 documents from yesterday’s delivery also raised eyebrows here at The Scoop. Many of the documents were “withdrawn� on claims of protection by the Privacy Act. But the usual way to conform with that law is to simply blot out, or “redact,� sensitive information about individuals, not to leave out entire documents as was done yesterday. On that note, 20 of 27 pages in a box of documents on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were listed as “Withdrawn.� Wherefore? Also, in what appears to have been a mistake by library staff, a folder containing discussions about affirmative action has gone missing.

Of course, we couldn’t let the report about Roberts’ advice to deny Michael Jackson a presidential thank-you note slide by without noting that the then-White House lawyer wrote snidely that “I hate to sound like one of Mr. Jackson’s records, constantly repeating the same refrain...� Say what you will about the former King of Pop, but this was 1984, and “Thriller� still ruled.

They're baaa-aaack… From the same producers who brought us Justice Sunday, we now have Justice Sunday Part Deux: Our Kind of Activism. (Sadly nothing like Festivus for the Rest of Us, and not nearly as entertaining.)

Okay, so maybe that isn't exactly the title, but that was the purpose of this weekend’s event. Such luminaries of logic and tolerance as Tom DeLay, James Dobson and Tony Perkins turned out on the bully pulpit in their Sunday finest. There was even a come-back role for Robert Bork.

They threw around words like "oligarchy" and "activism" and "autocracy." They railed against so-called “judicial activism� and rallied to support John Roberts. But when the Justice Sunday crowd talks about activism, let us be clear—they are demanding their own brand of activism, one that suits their political agenda, nothing more nothing less. It is the Rehnquist Supreme Court, after all, that overturned six decades of precedent in the 1990s when it began limiting Congress’ power, and has continued to strike down federal statutes at a rate that has alarmed legislators on both sides of the political aisle.

In a letter to Judge Roberts, Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter decried this activism and its implication that the Supreme Court has on too many occasions decided that Congress lacks competence to decide certain issues of national importance. The fact that Roberts has expressed that the Rehnquist Court is “not very conservative,� suggests that the nominee has doesn’t share Specter’s (and our) concern that that this type of activism is a problematic revision of constitutional checks and balances.

Mildly encouraging news out of the White House yesterday evening: in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, White House Counsel Harriet Miers sets forth a timeline for the release of more Reagan-era Roberts documents. Though this is encouraging, at least two issues of great concern remain.

First, the Bush administration has not backed off from its refusal to release documents from the three-plus years Roberts spent as the Principal Deputy Solicitor General during the Bush I years his most recent and most powerful public policy-making position. Hopefully, today's letter from Judiciary Democrats to Attorney General Gonzales will change some minds.

Second, Miers' letter contains three eyebrow-raising references to a so-called Constitutionally-based privilege, which she says may be invoked to withhold some of Roberts' documents. You can do your due diligence and check for yourself, but the Constitution we've been reading doesn't contain any passages about a presidential privilege to shield information from the public.

For a little Friday levity, check out the far-right's latest demagoguery extravaganza, "Justice Sunday II," where, among other things, activists plan to continue trying to paint the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, half of whom are Catholic, as anti-Catholic. Along related lines, the New York Times reports that John Roberts did some politico-religious profiling of his own back in the day, promoting a friend of his who was applying for a high-level Justice Department job as a "deeply religious Protestant."

Yesterday, the New York Times reported (repeated also here and here) that Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon asked John Roberts whether Congress had the power to intervene in a case like the late Terri Schiavo. Specifically he asked, "whether it was constitutional for Congress to intervene in an end-of-life case with a specific remedy."

Roberts responded, "I am concerned with judicial independence. Congress can prescribe standards, but when Congress starts to act like a court, and prescribe particular remedies in particular cases, Congress has overstepped the bounds."

As you can imagine, this is a bit of a bombshell for conservative extremist types that thought it was perfectly appropriate to pass a law in the wee hours of the morning that was specifically aimed at one woman's ongoing private tragedy. Despite the fact that Sen. Wyden's staff wrote John Roberts' response down "word-for-word," everyone's favorite faux District Attorney (and Roberts shepherd) Fred Thompson has a remarkably different recollection. And his staff has notes to back him up too! Hmmm.

So, we have a bit of a mystery here gang, but underlying that is a very important revelation. A Supreme Court nominee, when asked a hypothetical question regarding a specific issue related to Congressional authority and privacy has answered the question. Write that on a sticky note and tack it on the fridge... we at the Scoop think a precedent has been set for the hearings starting September 6th.

Starting today we'll be spreading the content around a bit more by publishing the Insider Scoop here as well as on the main SCW page. Today was our number one podcast download day yet, so thanks for listening!

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Jo Becker of the Washington Post reports that the administration is holding back thousands of pages of documents, looking for any “surprises.� Clearly this demonstrates the administration’s commitment to an open process and respect for the Constitution’s role for the Senate. Certainly it is more important for the White House to get its way than it is for the Senate to be able to perform its advice and consent duty. Do they want a chance to whitewash a record that may be too far out of the mainstream for most Americans, Americans who overwhelmingly prefer a moderate justice?

Becker also notes that “three weeks [after the nomination of Roberts], [White House] officials say they recognize that Roberts's record is going to be central to Senate confirmation hearings.� This is a revelation? It comes as a surprise that the Senate and the American people might be interested in the record of a person who could be making decisions that impact their lives every day for decades to come? Yes, that is quite the stunning revelation.

And it seems like the Bush administration just can’t make anybody happy lately—conservative groups supporting Robert charge that the White House isn’t doing enough to stand up for John Roberts and his record. That instead of trying to spin what he’s done into something palatable, the White House should stand up and say Roberts was unequivocally correct in his thinking on these issues. Here we have to agree with Sean Rushton. (Blue moons do happen.) Well, kind of. If Roberts’ record demonstrates that he is committed to the rights and protections enshrined in the Constitution, why is the White House trying so hard to obfuscate or run a public relations campaign? The record can and should speak for itself. So, let the Senate and the American people take a look at that record without further delay.

- Tim

With a significant chunk of the District off on summer vacation, we at Supreme Court Watch like to kick back, relax and... read a lot of John Roberts' old memos. Well, it beats some retread Danielle Steele novel.

This week on SCW... John Roberts speaks (sort of)... the White House says you don't deserve to know more about its nominee... more Meet John Roberts... and yet another Magic 8 Ball. Look for SCW #7 in your podcatcher on Wednesday.

UPDATE... we'll also be covering the latest news regarding a rather pointed letter coming out of Sen. Specter's office that shows he's got a few questions for Mr. Roberts. Take a look at today's Insider Scoop for the um, insider scoop.

Special note... our hosts at Liberated Syndication are having some issues as they move to a new set of servers that make Hal from 2001 seem like a toaster with an irritating disposition. The upshot is that download times should be much better when this is all figured out. If you've been having downloading problems, let us know at podcast@afj.org and we'll find a super secret back way to get you the shows you need.

Because vacations are for suckers... enjoy this tidbit from the Washington Post.

As we transition into August and slide into the Congressional recess, the Roberts nomination promises to put a hold on the traditional "quiet time" in DC.

But at SCW podcast, there is no rest for the weary... this week... more Meet John Roberts, more fun with audio clips of highly rated crime dramas, more Magic 8 Ball, and... best of all... slightly higher audio quality!

So, subscribe to the feed and consider listening to us at the beach with your mp3 player... it might be our only shot at actually getting to the beach this summer...