The battle over Supreme Court nominee John Roberts is heating up. On Tuesday, the White House released 15,000 pages of documents stemming from Roberts service as an attorney for the Reagan administration. But the administration is refusing to hand over documents related to his work as deputy solicitor general under the first President Bush.

According to the Washington Post, the newly released documents show that Roberts was a significant backstage player in the legal policy debates of the early Reagan administration.

• Roberts presented a defense of bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases.
• He argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, the landmark law that bars sex discrimination in intercollegiate athletic programs.
• And he even counseled his boss on how to tell the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow that the administration was cutting off federal funding for the Atlanta center that bears his name.
• Other documents show that Roberts argued for restrictions on the rights of prisoners to litigate their grievances.
• He depicted as “judicial activism” a lower court’s order requiring a sign-language interpreter for a hearing-impaired public school student who had already been given a hearing aid and tutors.
• And he argued for wider latitude for prosecutors and police to question suspects out of the presence of their attorneys.

According to the Washington Post, in the rare instances revealed in the documents in which Roberts disagreed with his superiors on the proper legal course to take on major social issues of the day, he advocated a more conservative tack.