Martin Dyckman: Justice John Roberts has hurt minorities, consumers, democracy

His reputation as a harsh critic of the Voting Rights Act and an advocate for corporations preceded John Roberts to his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2005. As chief justice, he said, he would be like a baseball umpire impartially calling balls and strikes.

“Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them,” he testified. ” … I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform.”

It turned out, though, that this “umpire” was wearing his old team colors under his new black robe.

His decisions to gut the Voting Rights Act, immunize big business from class action lawsuits and flood our elections with unlimited corporate contributions have brought grief to the public interest and joy to the plutocracy.

Roberts’ enmity to the Voting Rights Act is told in depressing detail in one of the most important books published recently: Ari Berman‘s “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.” A condensed version is available on the POLITICO website.

The National Archives yielded extensive documentation of Roberts’ 10- year vendetta against the Voting Rights Act while a young law clerk to conservative Justice William Rehnquist, as a legal aide to Ronald Reagan’s attorney general William French Smith and as an assistant in the Office of White House Counsel.

He tried unsuccessfully to weaken it where it was strong and defeat bipartisan efforts to strengthen it where it was weak.

He finally triumphed three years ago in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which he trashed the formula (Section 4) that determined what states, or parts of states including Florida, had to get Justice Department pre-clearance for law or policy changes affecting voting rights.

That left the Justice Department with only after-the-fact recourse to courts to combat a relentless, nationwide attack against the voting rights that most people thought had been secured with the blood shed at Selma, Ala., in 1965.

By pretending that the law had eliminated obstacles to minority voters, Roberts made the law a victim of its own success. In reality, the Justice Department had used Section 4 to block thousands of sly and cynical attempts to undermine minority voting. With Section 4 out of the way, formerly covered jurisdictions like North Carolina swiftly enacted harsh new laws transparently designed to make it harder for blacks to vote. The long, tedious litigation against these laws will end at a court led by same justice who killed pre-clearance.

As an attorney in private practice, Roberts represented companies that meant to use the federal arbitration statute to prevent customers from suing them in court and prevent them from joining class-action lawsuits.

Roberts lost that case, but he had become chief justice when the court agreed to hear yet another, challenging a California court ruling that it was “unconscionable” for AT&T to muscle consumers into waiving their rights. The corporations won their appeal along with a subsequent decision eliminating the antitrust provisions of the Sherman Act as a barrier to that form of corporate arrogance.

“The antitrust laws do not guarantee an affordable procedural path to the vindication of every claim,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a majority opinion that Roberts supported.

The key word there was “affordable.” As every justice knew — and as the dissenters pointed out sharply — the deck is stacked against consumers when it’s the companies that choose the arbitrators, and class action lawsuits are the only effective check on corporate misconduct.

If you think a company has cheated you out of, say, $30, any lawyer would laugh you out of the office. But a million or so people with the same complaint make a case worth taking.

Over the past ten years, my wife and I have received $201 as our shares of seven class action settlements — the smallest for $3.73, the largest for $63.90. Most were against banks that had milked extra charges from credit cards. Nearly everyone with a credit card has probably gotten money.

But that’s history. Every card now comes with conditions requiring the customer to submit claims to arbitration and forego class action lawsuits. You can refuse those conditions if you can live without credit cards.

If you go overseas, expect to be stiffed on exchange rates. There’s nothing to stop the banks now.

In a rare defeat for Roberts that exposed the depths of his cynicism, the court voted 6-3 last month against a company that had tried to quash a class action suit involving unwanted mass text messages by offering a small sum of money to only the lead plaintiff. Had he accepted it, the case would have been dead, leaving thousands of others with nothing and the company with a cheap way out. To Roberts, though, the offer was enough.

No decision since the 1857 Dred Scott case has been as harmful as Citizens United, which put our democracy on the auction block. As it came to the court, the question was only whether a film attacking Hillary Clinton represented a prohibited expenditure. Roberts recast the case as an all-out attack on the campaign finance law. The self-styled umpire was calling the plays.

The point of these examples is that nothing presidents do matters more than their appointments to the Supreme Court.

Either of the two Democratic candidates for president would try to repair the enormous damage that Roberts and his allies have done. Would any of the Republicans? Not likely.

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Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in suburban Asheville, North Carolina.