a “maybe I’m amazed” missive from Liberal Street Fighter

“Those papers that we have received paint a picture of John Roberts as an eager and aggressive advocate of policies that are deeply tinged with the ideology of the far right wing of his party then, and now. In influential White House and Department of Justice positions, John Roberts expressed views that 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.”

Believe it or not, this quote from Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont was in today’s Washington Post.

Of course, many of us KNEW this already, but apparently word is starting to reach some of the Democratic Senators. One might ask what took their staffs so long ….

Could we be hearing this now because:

In a further bid to dispel an air of inevitability that liberals think too many Democrats have embraced, several organizations told allies that they will call for Roberts’s rejection this month rather than wait for the Senate hearings to start on Sept. 6, as some members of the anti-Roberts coalition have urged.

The senators and liberal groups were reacting in part to a Washington Post article noting that many Democratic lawmakers have expressed little interest in mounting a strong fight against Roberts, barring unexpected disclosures. The senators’ tepid stance has frustrated the organizations, which are important to the party, because they feel the information being gleaned from thousands of documents is starting to portray the nominee as someone considerably more conservative than the justice he would replace, Sandra Day O’Connor.

“What we’ve seen is breathtaking in his approach to weakening the enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Nancy M. Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “A picture is emerging that Roberts was there every step of the way taking the far right position. . . . He is no Sandra Day O’Connor.”

So maybe some shrill “single interest” groups could be having an effect, hmmmm?

Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, said Democrats who support Roberts could face a voter backlash, particularly if he turns out to be as conservative as the groups contend. “History shows us that voters turned on Alan Dixon for his vote on Clarence Thomas and voters gave Arlen Specter the toughest reelection of his life,” Aron said, referring to the former Democratic senator from Illinois and the current Republican senator from Pennsylvania. If grass-roots voters “are where we expect they’ll be around the time of the vote [on Roberts], they’ll remember long and hard.”

Ralph G. Neas, head of the liberal People for the American Way, noted that “there have been almost daily revelations from the Reagan Presidential Library” indicating that, as a young White House lawyer, Roberts “was a charter member of the Reagan-Bush legal policy team that had attempted to dismantle the civil rights remedies” embraced by previous GOP administrations. He added: “I believe a significant number of progressive organizations will soon be coming out against the Roberts nomination.”

Neas declined to say whether his group will be among them. But several liberal activists said they have been told that People for the American Way, the Alliance for Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other major groups plan, before Labor Day, to urge Roberts’s rejection. These groups have expressed concerns about Roberts since President Bush nominated him on July 19, but they have stopped short of calling for rejection.

Roberts has many troubling views, at least as revealed in many documents:

“As we review more and more documents, I think we’re finding more evidence that Roberts would vote with the far-right wing of the court and against civil rights protections,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

In his letter to colleagues, Kennedy said recently released evidence “shows that he was on or beyond the outer fringe of that extreme group eager to take our law and society back in time on a wide range of issues of individual rights and liberties, and on broad issues of government responsiveness to public needs.” For instance, Kennedy said, he “opposed effective voting rights legislation, and wanted to restrict laws vital to battling discrimination by recipients of federal funds.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement: “All this talk about whether Democrats will support the Roberts nomination is laughably premature. . . . 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.”

Speaking of documents, it seems a file folder of Robert’s writings for the Reagan Administration went missing “after its review by two lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department in July”

As part of a vetting process before Roberts’s formal nomination by the White House in late July, the two lawyers requested and were granted special access to the Roberts files. Neither the White House nor the Justice Department would name the lawyers yesterday, but sources said one works for White House counsel Harriet Miers and the other is an aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Upon the lawyers’ arrival, Archives officials said, they asked to inspect various folders, and as they were pulled from the boxes, a marker was inserted in their place and the lawyers signed a checkout sheet. An attendant present in the room at all times did not, as a matter of routine, sign a form signifying the return of each folder.

Nonetheless, Fawcett said, “we are quite confident that the records were returned to us.” Asked why, she said that while the attendant does not recall seeing the affirmative action file in question put back, the marker was not in the box after the lawyers departed. “It would have been very difficult, given the circumstances in the room,” for the lawyers to have retained the file because they were separated from their bags, she said.

Instead, the folder was evidently lost later when all of the Roberts documents were transferred to new, acid-free folders and reorganized in anticipation of their disclosure to the Senate and news media.

It is “very difficult to believe it’s anyone other than ourselves responsible for this loss,” Fawcett said.

Well, maybe it’s hard for HER to believe it … and is anybody else noticing a troubling pattern here? The more an issue involves the rights of women, the more extreme Judge Roberts seems to become.