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How Will John Roberts Be Remembered? As a Democracy Destroyer
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than this man.
Sep 15, 2025
Chief Justice John Roberts is smart and skilled. He will be remembered, however, as a historic failure.
This is not a claim to make lightly, but his record compels it, because Roberts’ legacy will be defined by two catastrophic roles he played.
First, Roberts has played the lead role in destroying indispensable rules of our democracy.
Second, Roberts has played the lead judicial role in serving as the handmaiden to President Trump’s efforts to turn our democracy into an autocracy. (This historic failure will be detailed next week in Part II).
Roberts’ role in destroying essential rules of our democracy
Chief Justice Roberts has taken the lead in writing a series of opinions that have destroyed essential rules governing our democracy. They deal with:
- The sacred right of every eligible citizen to vote.
- The integrity and honesty of the political system.
- The right of citizens to have an unrigged opportunity to choose their representatives.
- The idea that public officials should not be allowed to sell influence with their office.
- The foundational principle that no person is above the law.
The following opinions, written by Roberts and joined in all but one case only by the Republican-appointed majority on the Court, have done unprecedented harm to our democracy.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). It declared key sections of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential voting rights law ever enacted, to be unconstitutional. The Act was reenacted periodically over decades until the Shelby County decision.
The Roberts opinion unleashed a wave of regressive and discriminatory voting changes by states and local jurisdictions that disadvantaged minority voters and impeded their voting rights and their ability to fully participate in the democratic process.
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) which struck down the aggregate limit on all contributions by a donor in an election cycle, a provision previously held constitutional by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976.
In Buckley, the Supreme Court had found that unlimited contributions given to support candidates were inherently corrupt. The McCutcheon decision, however, eviscerated the limits on individual contributions to candidates by unleashing billionaires, millionaires, and other big money donors to give unlimited, often huge, contributions to Super PACs to benefit specific candidates.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), in which the Court decided that it could not act on challenges to partisan redistricting plans. The decision claimed that the Court is incapable of establishing standards for determining when partisan maps become unconstitutional, no matter how extreme.
The Rucho decision means that there are no constitutional restrictions on partisan gerrymandering, no matter how rigged the plans are. The result is that politicians get to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.
Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion in McDonnell v. United States, (2016), which vacated the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell for honest services fraud and extortion. In his opinion, Roberts said that McDonnell’s actions did not constitute “official acts” under the applicable laws, including the bribery law.
In its decision, the Court adopted a narrow, unrealistic construction of the term “official act” to exclude various acts of an officeholder that should be covered, even when those acts are done in direct exchange for gifts or other benefits. For all practical purposes, the Court has left the country without effective bribery laws to prevent public officials from selling their office for financial benefits.
Roberts wrote the opinion for a 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States (2024), which gave Trump presidential criminal immunity. The decision violated a guiding principle of our Founders that no person is above the law. The Roberts opinion placing Trump above the law and also giving him personal control of the Justice Department and FBI can be seen in such outrageous Trump pronouncements as the statement that he has “The right to do anything I want to. I’m the president of the United States,” and “I run the country and the world.”
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than Roberts. And that is how he will be remembered.
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How the Corrupt Supreme Court Helped Create the US Gun Violence Crisis
Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults so far this year.
Sep 12, 2025
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”—Charlie Kirk
Republican Charlie Kirk is dead. So is former Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
Two clearly political assassinations in the past four months.
And a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association’s journal Pediatrics suggests that most of the deaths from the more than 250 mass shootings in America so far this year could also be classified as resulting from politics.
How did we get here, and what do we do?
In 2008, the in-the-National Rifle Association’s (NRA)-pocket Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did much the same thing that Sam Alito would later do with his Dobbs anti-abortion ruling: He reached back hundreds of years to look for a definition at the time the Second Amendment was written for how people then viewed the phrase “bear arms” and then twisted it beyond recognition.
The result was the corrupt Heller decision, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, which unleashed a new wave of guns on an unsuspecting America.
It was followed two years later by McDonald v Chicago, another NRA-purchased, all-Republican decision striking down Chicago’s gun control laws and forcing cities and blue states to accept more weapons whether their people—through their elected officials—wanted that tsunami of guns in their communities or not.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent in McDonald:
Although the Court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive—quite literally—to our Nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure.
As we saw Wednesday with the right’s new martyr, and have been seeing in the daily toll of gun deaths that America—alone among all other nations in the world—suffers from, Stevens was prescient.
We are literally the only country in the world that is experiencing this magnitude of gun crisis. Half of the guns in civilian hands in the entire world are here in the United States, so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the leading cause of childhood death in the US is bullets and political assassinations have become routine.
The study in Pediatrics looked at child gun deaths in America before and after the 2010 McDonald decision. What they found is shocking.
Hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry.
That decision caused two major changes in gun laws across America. The first was that nearly every red state loosened their gun laws, sometimes in the extreme, even allowing open carry of semiautomatic weapons of war without any permit or regulation. Most blue states, on the other hand, looked for and found ways around the decision to actually tighten their gun control laws.
The result was astonishing. Between 2011 and 2023, the study period, red states that had loosened their gun laws saw 7,453 more children killed by firearms than the pre-McDonald statistical trends would have predicted had the Republicans on the court not further loosened gun laws.
In blue states that maintained or strengthened their gun laws, though, child gun deaths remained the same as before McDonald and Heller, and, to quote the study:
“Four states (California, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island) had decreased pediatric firearm mortality after McDonald v Chicago, all of which were in the strict firearms law group.” (emphasis added)
Melissa Hortman was a strong advocate of gun control laws. Charlie Kirk opposed them. Both are dead by gunfire, along with hundreds of children and adults so far this year.
When Hortman was murdered by a politically-inspired right-wing thug, some conservatives on X and other platforms celebrated.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, for example, tweeted, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a picture of the shooter. An hour later, again showing the suspect’s picture, Sen. Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently trying to humorously reference Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and his advocacy for gun control.
Yesterday, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some liberals were posting the equivalent of “good riddance” to social media platforms, some making Lee’s obscene posts seem tame.
Both are reprehensible.
Instead, let’s take this moment to reflect on how the NRA’s work over the past decades—often funded and supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia (where gun control is rigid)—killed both of them. And tens of thousands of children and adults over the years.
This week NPR reported that school shootings have spawned a $4 billion industry selling everything from bulletproof backpacks to “panic buttons, bullet-resistant whiteboards, facial recognition technology, training simulators, body armor, guns, and tasers.” They note:
Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their US business. Now they’re the majority.
"It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don't need to be selling to schools," McDermott says.
Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents, and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments, and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.
It’s insane that America’s answer to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and the NRA flooding our country with deadly weapons is to create a multibillion-dollar industry to stop bullets or ameliorate their damage in our public schools.
The vast majority of Americans want rational gun control laws instead of this Wild West insanity. Every other developed country in the world has them; not a single one forces their children through the trauma of active shooter drills or subjects them to metal detectors and requires them to occasionally come face-to-face with murderous psychopaths armed to the teeth.
It’s way past time for our politicians to wake the hell up, and hopefully the assassination of a far-right “gun rights” icon will cause at least a few Republicans to break with their party’s fealty to the weapons industry and join with Democrats to Make America Safe Again.
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Another Gift to Trump: Supreme Court Lifts Lower Court Ban on 'Blatant Racial Profiling' by ICE Agents
"The court has opened the door to profiling practices that will expose millions of Latinos to harassment, wrongful detention, and fear in their daily lives," said one organization.
Sep 08, 2025
The US Supreme Court on Monday gave its approval for federal immigration agents to stop and detain anyone in the Los Angeles area based on factors including "the type of work one does," a person's use of Spanish or accented English, or their "apparent race or ethnicity"—allowing what critics called "blatant racial profiling" to be used to carry out President Donald Trump's mass detention and deportation plan.
The court's three liberal justices dissented, but the right-wing majority sided with the Department of Homeland Security, whose agents in recent months have carried out sweeping raids across the Los Angeles area, including in incidents that have been caught on video and appear to be armed roundups of large randomized groups of Latino people—not operations targeted at arresting violent criminals, as the Trump administration has previously suggested.
The court did not provide an explanation of its reasoning, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion expressing agreement with the ruling, saying the court was simply allowing immigration agents to use "commonsense" criteria for stopping and detaining people, including their English proficiency and the type of work they do.
In their dissenting opinion, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, "We should not have to live in a country where then government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job."
"Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent," wrote Sotomayor.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (AIC) said the ruling by the right-wing majority has troubling implications.
"Because a sizeable portion of Los Angeles's low-income Latino community is undocumented," he said, the court believes "it is inherently acceptable for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to stop and question any Latino working a low-wage job that is seen seeking Spanish."
Civil rights groups joined several individuals in filing a lawsuit against the administration earlier this year, arguing that thousands of people in Los Angeles have been wrongly arrested in unconstitutional, "indiscriminate immigration operations."
"Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force," the plaintiffs argued, "and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents have been violating the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment, they said, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
In July, Judge Maame E. Frimpong in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ordered agents not to stop or arrest people in the Los Angeles area based on factors including race and ethnicity, language spoken, or their involvement in particular kinds of work including at day-laborer or farming sites.
The Trump administration later appealed to the Supreme Court, saying the lower court's order had unlawfully interfered with ICE operations and claiming agents use discretion to ensure they don't wrongfully include people in immigration sweeps.
The plaintiffs argued that the administration's "roving patrols have routinely stopped US citizens... without an individualized assessment of reasonable suspicion," including plaintiff Jason Brian Gavidia, who was approached by masked agents outside a tow yard and told them he was an American as they slammed him against a metal fence and took his phone and ID, demanding to know what hospital he'd been born at.
The Los Angeles Times reported in July that the majority of people arrested by ICE and other immigration agents have no criminal record.
The case the Supreme Court ruled on Monday is still pending before a federal appeals court, which could again restrict the administration's ability to racially profile residents.
But for now, AIC policy director Nayna Gupta said the Supreme Court ruling "greenlights the worst ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] practices we are seeing against Latino communities around the country."
"We can expect this racist enforcement to expand rapidly," said Gupta.
The ACLU of Southern California called the Supreme Court ruling "a devastating setback for communities" across the Los Angeles area.
Today, in a devastating setback for communities in the southland, SCOTUS granted the Trump administration’s request to resume its racist raids across Southern California while our case continues. We’re prepared to continue fighting for our immigrant loved ones and the Constitution.
— ACLU SoCal (@aclusocal.bsky.social) September 8, 2025 at 1:18 PM
A bipartisan group of the executive committee of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials called the decision "a troubling setback for civil rights and constitutional protections."
"The Constitution does not allow Americans to be stopped simply for speaking Spanish, waiting for work, or looking Latino. Reasonable suspicion must be based on evidence, not ethnicity," said the officials. "By siding with the administration, the court has opened the door to profiling practices that will expose millions of Latinos to harassment, wrongful detention, and fear in their daily lives. Whether at bus stops, workplaces, or public spaces, Latino communities will face the risk of being treated as suspects simply because of who they are or what they look like."
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