I remember attending John Roberts’ confirmation hearings in 2005 (including the one in which my father, Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, testified), and noticing a cabal of young lawyers – all of them white Ivy League men – there to support him.
I was struck at the time by their smugness, their confidence in their assured future success, and their generally privileged and rather off-putting and often rude and condescending conduct and demeanor.
Several of my colleagues noted it too, with one saying to me, “They look like the young Aryan Nation. If we don’t stop them, this is our future.”
I have no doubt that those young men we saw then have been, over the last 20 years helping to build the foundation for the MAGA movement and have been instrumental in Project 2025 and its related agendas.
And they are the middle-aged men who are now putting the finishing touches on their wholesale takeover of our democracy. Foremost among their cohort is Brett Kavanaugh, who now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court, but was a high-level White House official when Roberts was appointed and confirmed. The following year, he was appointed to the federal appellate court, which launched his elevation to the Supreme Court where he now is fervently carrying out the MAGA agenda.
It’s important to understand that this didn’t just spring up with the rise of Trump. It has been in the works for decades, even before Roberts’ ascension to the Court. In fact, Roberts was one of the young lawyers in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses that my father described in his testimony as stoking the fires for what is happening today.
“At the time I left my job as General Counsel of the NAACP, a position that I had occupied which Thurgood Marshall also occupied, I had been involved in litigating major civil rights cases all across the country. I joined the court upon appointment by President Carter in 1979.
“At that time, we thought generally that certain civil rights principles were settled. We thought that the issue of school desegregation was settled in light of Chief Justice Burger’s decision in Swann in which he said that busing transportation was an appropriate remedy when you had a finding of constitutional violations that rigged a school district.
“We thought the issue of affirmative action was settled with the Bakke case and Justice Powell’s plurality opinion in which he said you may take race into account.
“But we find that following that case, or those cases which I thought were settled, I was then sitting as a judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and I was engaged in dealing with the first wave of attacks against school desegregation and against affirmative action. The challenges claiming preferential treatment, claiming “forced busing,” all of these buzzwords were coming at the court and we were then faced with the decision, are these principles settled?
“I have now learned that in the boiler room of the Reagan administration, stoking out and crafting out a lot of the theories that were being used in the courts to attack these settled principles, was the nominee [John Roberts]. *
This is a long plan coming to fruition. Many of us have tried to warn of this happening, but were ignored or accused of overreacting.
But now that the danger is clear, we all must do everything in our power to stop it.
VOTE BIDEN-HARRIS and VOTE BLUE up and down the ticket.
*You can watch my father’s full testimony here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?188799-3/roberts-confirmation-hearing-day-4-part-3