At Choose Roberts’s affirmation listening to in 2005, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressed him on what Mr. Kennedy charact
At Choose Roberts’s affirmation listening to in 2005, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressed him on what Mr. Kennedy characterised as his “slim and cramped, and maybe even a meanspirited view of the legislation” given his feedback in 1982. However Choose Roberts mentioned he was merely arguing the place of the Reagan administration and his boss.
“I used to be a workers lawyer within the Justice Division,” he informed Mr. Kennedy. “It was the place of the Reagan administration for whom I labored, the place of the legal professional normal for whom I labored, that the Voting Rights Act must be prolonged for the longest interval of its extension in historical past with out change.”
Eight years later, the chief justice wrote the opinion dismantling important components of the Voting Rights Act, saying that “issues have modified dramatically” because the legislation’s adoption in 1965 and that governments ought to not be subjected to preclearance.
“The exams and units that blocked poll entry have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years,” he mentioned.
Critics of that ruling and the next one issued final month argue that the host of measures numerous states have handed in latest months clarify that Republicans have discovered new “exams and units” to limit entry to the poll. These embody provisions that make it more durable to vote early or by mail, banning or proscribing drop packing containers, shortening early or absentee voting durations and giving extra leeway to partisan ballot watchers.
In his 2005 testimony, Mr. Lewis, who was badly crushed in a civil rights march in Selma, Ala., in 1965, steered that the nominee didn’t grasp what it had value to enact the voting measure within the first place.
“In 1965, Jurist Roberts was 10 years outdated,” Mr. Lewis testified. “He could also be a superb lawyer, however I wonder if he can actually perceive the depth of what it took to get the Voting Rights Act handed.”
“As a lot of you realize, I gave just a little blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” he informed the senators, referring to the location of the march in Selma. “However a few of my associates and colleagues gave all they’d, their very lives for the suitable to vote.”