Who is Judge Roberts? (WSWS article)

[IndianaGreen]

Who is Judge Roberts?
By Barry Grey
21 July 2005

Just last Friday, Roberts joined a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals overturning a lower court ruling in order to uphold the Bush administration’s use of military commissions to try alleged terrorists being held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. In this ruling, Roberts and his cohorts implied that the president has a right to declare any individual, including a US citizen, an “enemy combatant” and thereby deprive him of the due-process rights provided by the US Constitution as well as the protections stipulated in international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions.

This is only the most ominous and overtly anti-democratic of a number of decisions handed down by Roberts in the course of his brief tenure on the DC Court of Appeals. Roberts upheld a lower court decision that the arrest, search, handcuffing and detention of a 12-year-old girl for eating a single French fry in a Washington subway station did not violate her Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.

In another case, Roberts joined in a ruling upholding police car trunk searches even when officers did not assert evidence of a crime. Roberts also issued a dissenting opinion in an Endangered Species Act case in a manner that showed he was inclined to hold an array of environmental laws and other federal protections to be unconstitutional.

This ruling is indicative of an ideological posture that has the most far-reaching implications. According to Forbes.com, “Roberts has also written in favor of a more aggressive reading of the Constitution’s Contract Clause that would prevent government from imposing new obligations on businesses in their dealings with employees. The last time the Supreme Court took such a stand was in the early 1930s when it struck down elements of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/robe-j21.shtml