When Roberts first arrived at DOJ in 1981, fresh off a clerkship for William Rehnquist at the Supreme Court, he was assigned two important portfolios: prepping Sandra Day O’Connor for her confirmation hearings and voting rights. O’Connor sailed through the Senate. The VRA would be more contentious: A 1980 Supreme Court decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden had required plaintiffs making a Section 2 claim to prove that lawmakers had racial-discrimination intent. That’s difficult to demonstrate, and it brought nearly all Section 2 litigation to a halt.
Civil-rights groups, Democrats, and moderate Republicans wanted to use the VRA reauthorization to override Mobile and clarify that Congress clearly meant to remedy all racially discriminatory effects. The Reagan administration was divided. Moderate Reaganites did not want to battle over the landmark law, which was popular. Ideological conservatives within DOJ spoiled for a fight. They were content to extend the act, just so long as it was impossible to use. Roberts led the way.
Roberts’s papers from this era, housed at the National Archives, show his determination and dedication. They include memos and talking points, draft op-eds, scripted answers for bosses to deliver in meetings and before Congress, and presentations he gave to senators and Hill staff. These files show how Roberts devised the messaging strategies that made it possible for the administration to claim it supported the VRA, while actually helping to neuter it—an approach he has since mastered as chief justice.
When Roberts started as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith at DOJ in August 1981, pragmatic White House aides who wanted to avoid the messiness of a voting-rights fight appeared to hold the winning hand. Earlier that summer, the conservative representative Henry Hyde had experienced something of a conversion after public hearings across the South, reversed his own position, and urged his old friend Ronald Reagan to come aboard. Reagan addressed a national NAACP convention that June and vowed he would never allow barriers to be placed between any citizen and the ballot box. By August, he told The Washington Star that he would back whatever 10-year reauthorization Congress sent him, punting the question of intent versus effects to lawmakers.