Roberts’ Role in Romer Case Raises Questions     8/12/2005
By Robert Knight

Meanwhile, NARAL attacks the Supreme Court nominee with a vicious TV ad.

As conservative groups weighed in on the news that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts had done pro bono work assisting homosexual activist lawyers in the pivotal Romer v. Evans (1996) case, Roberts’ critics on the left were sparing no bile in a new television ad assailing him.

NARAL Pro-Choice America, the chief lobby group for abortionists, created a TV spot featuring a nurse maimed in an abortion clinic bombing. The ad blames Roberts for the violence because he once argued in a brief filed by the U.S. Justice Department that pro-life demonstrators could not be compared to the Ku Klux Klan and thereby be kept from blocking abortion clinic sites.

After criticism from the pro-life community and even pro-abortion Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), NARAL apparently withdrew the ad today.

Here’s the background: As Deputy U.S. Solicitor General, Roberts joined Solicitor General Kenneth Starr and others in arguing in a friend of the court brief in Bray vs. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic (1991) that “a conspiracy to deter pregnant women from obtaining abortions” does not involve “the kind of class-based animus” that is illegal under federal civil rights law.

Concerned Women for America also weighed in on that case, arguing on behalf of the pro-life demonstrators.

The ad employs the bracketing technique, in which a disturbing image (the maimed nurse) is shown just before Roberts’ image in order to associate the two. Although the spot is transparently inflammatory, it could influence viewers who are not paying close attention, such as passengers watching a monitor in an airport lounge.

Meanwhile, Concerned Women for America, like other conservative groups, is troubled by a Los Angeles Times article on August 4 revealing that Roberts, while employed at a law firm, did pro bono work for the homosexual activist side in the pivotal Romer v. Evans case in 1996.

Romer was one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in the last 50 years. It violated the rights of the people of Colorado to determine their own laws, and it set the stage for the disastrous, unconstitutional Lawrence v. Texas (2003) ruling striking down state sodomy laws. That latter ruling, which dismissed morality as a basis for any law, has led directly to homosexual “marriage” in Massachusetts and challenges to statutes barring polygamy and sales of obscene materials.

CWA, however, questions the timing of the revelation; the major source is a longtime liberal activist with ties to People for the American Way.

Walter A. Smith Jr., then head of the pro bono department at Hogan & Hartson, told the Times that Roberts was eager to help in the case: "He said, 'Let's do it.' And it's illustrative of his open-mindedness, his fair-mindedness. He did a brilliant job."

Roberts did not include the Romer case in a 67-page response to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire on his legal work released last week.

"John probably didn't recall [the case] because he didn't play as large a role in it as he did in others," Smith told the Times. "I'm sure John has a record somewhere of every case he ever argued, and Romer he did not argue. So he probably would have remembered it less."

CWA finds the news troubling, but also recognizes that this has the earmarks of a liberal attempt to drive a wedge into Judge Roberts’ conservative support and derail his nomination.

Judge Roberts allegedly donated about five hours to the case, playing the part of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in a moot court and also providing advice to attorneys from Lambda Legal Defense Foundation, which brought the case.

It is standard practice for attorneys at private firms to donate pro bono hours, sometimes even for clients with whom they have philosophical differences. But they don’t have to take every case offered them. Columnists Ann Coulter and Don Feder have since written articles warning that little is known about Judge Roberts, much as little was known about previous appointee David Souter, who was touted as a conservative but who quickly became part of the court’s most liberal wing.

In another development, The Washington Times reported on August 11 that Roberts, in a 1982 memo to Attorney General William French Smith, referred to Free Congress Foundation founder Paul Weyrich as “of course, no friend of ours.”

Weyrich is a longtime friend of Concerned Women for America and one of America’s greatest conservative champions. The memo was written in response to an inquiry from the left-leaning American Bar Association to a book authored by Weyrich, “A Blueprint for Judicial Reform.” The memo, in which Roberts misspelled Weyrich as “Weyerich,” was one of several that Roberts wrote to advise Smith on how to handle conservatives who had been instrumental in securing President Reagan’s election, according to the Times.

Finally, Human Events, the conservative newsweekly, ran a story today that Roberts spent about 12 hours as a private attorney representing Playboy Entertainment Group in its case against a federal law that requires scrambling cable porn channels or restricting the hours so that children are not inadvertently exposed.

“Roberts played the role of a Supreme Court justice in a moot court setting, preparing Playboy’s lead counsel, Robert Corn-Revere, who worked in Hogan & Hartson’s communications department, for his oral argument before the Supreme Court,” Human Events reporter Robert Bluey reports. Unlike the Romer case, Roberts was paid for the work.

Meanwhile, as the NARAL ad demonstrates, leftist groups continue to attack Roberts, portraying him as a far-right extremist. They have taken particular issue with Roberts’ association with the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers group.

Concerned Women for America finds the latest news stories troubling, while deploring the left’s vicious attacks on Judge Roberts. CWA has not altered its call for the Senate to give Judge Roberts thorough and fair hearings and a timely up-or-down vote.

He and the American people deserve no less.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America.

For CWA's press release on the NARAL ad, click here.

Paul Weyrich has written a series on "The Next Conservativism." To access it on CWA's Web site, click here.

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