WASHINGTON — The White House opened to the public Tuesday thousands of pages from the files of a young assistant attorney general but declared off-limits all the files from the years when John G. Roberts Jr., now a Supreme Court nominee, was a top government lawyer urging the repeal of the Roe vs. Wade abortion ruling.
No one on Capitol Hill had asked for the Reagan-era files. But Senate Democrats said they were interested in what Roberts wrote and said during his four years in the first Bush administration as top deputy to Solicitor Gen. Kenneth W. Starr. Of particular interest is his role in Starr's attack on Roe vs. Wade.
It is not clear whether Roberts, deputy solicitor general from 1989 to 1993, agreed with the administration's position in the abortion cases. But the White House, arguing the information is privileged, made it clear Tuesday that it did not want to reveal what he said or wrote during those years.
"What we are providing goes above and beyond what a reasonable person would expect to be made available," said President Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan. "This is more than what senators need to be able to do their job."
Eight Senate Democrats called the White House move "premature and ill-advised."
"We are disappointed that the White House appears to have so quickly moved to close off access by the Senate to important and informative documents written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts while he was at the Department of Justice," they said in a letter to Bush.
Other documents that the Senate will not get include Roberts' tax returns for the last three years, the Washington Post reported today, citing a shift in policy. Instead, the IRS will provide a one-page "tax check" summary of his three most recent returns. Though it was not publicly announced at the time, a long-standing policy of requiring judicial nominees at all levels to release three years' of tax information was changed in 2001, when the Bush administration took office, "to reduce the duplicative paperwork and streamline the process," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told the Post.
The White House did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The documents dispute broke a period of relative harmony between the White House and Senate Democrats on Roberts' nomination.
Nearly all of the Democrats had agreed that the president's high court nominee was well-qualified. But several Judiciary Committee members said they wanted to learn more about Roberts' views on the law before deciding whether to support him.
