Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts

John Roberts

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Judge John Roberts adheres to the same inconsistent view of federal power held by many of the other short-listed nominees: a philosophy that rejects Congress' authority to enact many of the laws that protect our civil rights, but supports an expansive view of presidential power.

Judge Roberts was appointed to the D.C. Circuit in May 2003. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University and clerked for Justice Rehnquist. He served in a number of positions in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, including as principal deputy solicitor general from 1989 to 1993.

As an attorney with the government, he also sought to end a number of desegregation decrees, to allow religious ceremonies in public school graduation programs and he argued in U.S. v. Eichman that a law prohibiting flag burning was constitutional.

More recently, Judge Roberts was one of only two dissenters on the D.C. Circuit in the case arising out of the secret proceedings of the vice president's advisory group on energy policy. Roberts sided with the administration in its efforts to keep sensitive records from being made public. (On remand from the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit found in favor of the administration.)

As principle deputy solicitor general, Roberts took an expansive view of the government's right to gag doctors from discussing abortion and also argued for an expansive view of the rights of Operation Rescue protestors. In the former case, he argued that Roe was wrongly decided and that a "fundamental right to an abortion ? finds no support in the text, structure or history of the constitution."