Questions For John Roberts--WashPost

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/16/AR2005081601178.html?referrer=email


By Deborah Ellis

Wednesday, August 17, 2005; Page A13

The furor over the recent NARAL Pro-Choice America ad about John Roberts and abortion clinics is unfortunate in that it obscures an important issue that raises serious questions: John Roberts's role as deputy solicitor general in the court case Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic. In that case, Roberts argued on the side of Operation Rescue for a narrow interpretation of one of our nation's civil rights laws.

The case was not about clinic bombings, lawful protest outside abortion clinics or even abortion rights. As Justice John Paul Stevens said in his 1993 dissenting opinion, the case was "about the exercise of Federal power to control an interstate conspiracy to commit illegal acts."


Why were these cases necessary? For a decade leading up to 1993, Operation Rescue and other national groups organized massive human blockades to forcibly prevent women from entering abortion clinics. This was a strategy designed to overwhelm small police forces so the blockaders could not be arrested. I argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of women's health clinics and female patients in the Bray case. We used a Reconstruction-era civil rights law to obtain protection from federal marshals so women could safely enter abortion clinics. The 1871 law was enacted for exactly this purpose: to prevent mobs from conspiring to take away the civil rights of newly freed slaves.

In the summer of 1991, during a particularly large blockade in Wichita, John Roberts went on national television to defend the government's decision under President George H.W. Bush to file a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of Operation Rescue. That brief asked a federal court to stay implementation of an injunction against the blockades that had already been issued. In contrast to Little Rock in 1957, when federal marshals protected African American children trying to integrate schools, Roberts argued that women should be left to whatever protection the states could provide, however inadequate...."

It goes too far to label Roberts as a fellow-traveler with Operation Rescue. But if he subscribes to such a crabbed view of federal civil rights authority that he would jeopardize the rights -- and even the safety -- of half the population, that distinction may not matter."

The writer is an assistant dean at the New York University School of Law. She represented the abortion clinics in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992.

[crikkett]

1. kick for wimmins rights!

:kick: