Is John Roberts a Racist?

This article by William L. Taylor is very disturbing and suggests Roberts is, at minimum, extremely insensitive to matters of race. An example:

The issue that has had the most far-reaching implications for civil rights was given the unilluminating name "court stripping." It was part of the continuing legal struggle over enforcing the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end mandated racial segregation in public schools. Efforts to implement Brown had stalled until 1964, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which declared school desegregation to be national policy and provided the means for enforcing it. There followed Supreme Court decisions adding legal content to the act, which then led to widespread desegregation of public schools throughout the South.

In 1980, segregationists in Congress led by Senator Jesse Helms responded with bills to prohibit the Justice Department from bringing action in the courts to desegregate schools, and to bar the courts from issuing remedies that would require the busing of students for that purpose. Similar bills were proposed in cases involving school prayer and abortion rights.

A fierce debate followed at the Justice Department and in the Reagan White House. Some lawyers recognized that a great deal was at stake in these bills—that they were an assault on the Supreme Court's role as the final arbiter of what the Constitution means as well as an assault on the separation of powers. David Brink, then president of the American Bar Association, described the court-stripping bills as "a legislative threat to our nation that may lead to the most serious constitutional crisis since our great Civil War," and the ABA House of Delegates "strongly objected" to the bills because they "propose to change the constitutional law by simple legislation, instead of by the means provided in the constitution."

In addition, the Conference of Chief Justices of the States resolved unanimously that court-stripping bills were a "hazardous experiment with the vulnerable fabric of the nation's judicial system." Within the Department of Justice Theodore Olson, then Roberts's superior and a lawyer with impeccable conservative credentials, worried about the advisability of supporting the legislation. Other constitutional conservatives, such as Yale Law School professor Alex Bickel (an ardent opponent of busing), and moderate Republicans, such as former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, as well as Robert Bork (who was to become a model of extreme legal conservatism), expressed concern publicly about the constitutionality and wisdom of court stripping. John Roberts had no such reservations. In memos deriding Brink and others, he claimed that Congress had the power to eradicate busing as a "failed experiment."

In other words, Roberts was much less concerned about an important infringement upon judicial power than about stopping school integration at all costs. This pattern of upholding reactionary views is seen in his writings.