Think Reagan
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

President George W. Bush’s choice to fill the vacancy left by the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist only intensifies interest in the question: “So who is John Roberts, anyway?”
Senate hearings, now postponed until Thursday at the earliest, likely won’t be much help in answering the question.
First Roberts must grin his way silently through a wind tunnel of senatorial eloquence called “opening statements.”
Then he’ll be pelted with questions designed either to flatter him or to corner him, and he’ll respond by declining to say anything that might get him in trouble.
No, if you want to get to know Roberts – not only how his mind works but also his approach to public life – there’s a better way: Take a look at memos he wrote from 1982 to 1986, when he served as a young lawyer in the White House Office of Legal Counsel under Ronald Reagan.
Last month the Reagan presidential library released thousands of pages of files on Roberts, and dozens of his memos have been summarized and quoted in news accounts.
What they show is this: Roberts is a Reaganite. You can’t understand him without reference to the man who brought him into public life.
The memos Roberts wrote show him at ease with Reagan’s position on the defining legal issues of the day. He shared, most notably, the president’s skepticism about a constitutional “right to privacy,” government-sanctioned race-based preferences and judicial second-guessing of Congress and the marketplace.
When a judge in Washington state endorsed “comparable worth” plans, designed to compensate women for past discrimination by mandating salary levels in the workplace, an appalled Roberts wrote a memo to his boss, White House counsel Fred Fielding.
“It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness of the ‘comparable worth’ theory,” Roberts wrote. “It mandates nothing less than the central planning of the economy by judges.”
A true Reaganite is a Reaganite first and a Republican second. Roberts found it particularly galling that three Republican congresswomen had urged the White House to endorse the judge’s “comparable worth” decision.
“I honestly find it troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace such a radical redistributive concept,” he wrote. “Their slogan may as well be, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.'”
Roberts was in his late 20s when he arrived in the White House. He was surrounded by people his own age, equally eager, equally committed to the Reagan agenda.
“We were all young enough to take Reagan’s imprint,” says Peter Robinson, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of two books on Reagan, who came to the Reagan White House as a speechwriter and found himself working in the office next to Roberts.
Along the same hallway were future Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, future U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher and future talk-show host Hugh Hewitt – Reaganites all.
“We felt that with Reagan, you got the whole package,” Robinson says. “He was for limited government, for a strict reading of the constitution, and he had a profound respect for the people. Yes, the people may make a mistake now and then but over time you could trust their wisdom. Those ideas fit exactly what we know about Roberts’s judicial philosophy.”
Reagan’s respect for, and deference to, the popular will had a flipside: a profound skepticism about an unelected judiciary that would substitute its judgment for the people’s. The memos show Roberts defending the prerogatives of the elected branches of government against the encroachments of judges.
“The federal judiciary,” he wrote in 1983, “benefits from an insulation from political pressure even as it usurps the role of the political branches.”
In the same memo Roberts even went so far as to endorse judicial term limits.
“Setting a term of, say,15 years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence,” Roberts wrote.
Toward the Supreme Court in particular, Roberts was downright puckish. He mocked the justices’ perennial complaints of overwork.
“While some of the tales of woe emanating from the Court are enough to bring tears to the eyes,” Roberts wrote, “it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.” The good news: “We know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.”
A vein of sly humor, self-assured but not arrogant, runs through the memos – an unfailing cheerfulness, too. Here also Roberts shows his Reaganite roots, for Reaganism was as much a matter of disposition as ideology.
“Watching Reagan, we learned a lesson in how you play the game,” Robinson says. “You see it in Roberts, too: a genuine friendliness and lightness of touch, combined with absolute determination and commitment to principle.”
The lightness of touch, you can be sure, will be on display in the Senate hearings, after the wind tunnel subsides and Roberts begins to answer questions. The determination and principle will show for decades to come, in the opinions of Justice Roberts. Those who approve will know who to thank.
In 1986, Roberts sent Reagan a note resigning his position in the counsel’s office.
“The inspiration you have given me will burn brightly in my heart long after I have left,” Roberts wrote.
Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.