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john roberts
Killing Trust: The Parlor Games of John Roberts’ Court
By relying on the fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power.
Jul 05, 2026
While driving home on June 30, my head nearly exploded as I listened to the evening news. Reporting on a raft of last-minute decisions passed by the Supreme Court in advance of the summer holidays, the SCOTUS correspondent explained that certain contra-Trump statutes barely managed to hold on for dear life while a more substantial pile of pro-Trump agenda items flew through with room to spare. It was the “you win some, you lose some” tone of the report that set my blood boiling. It felt like I was being told that, on the one hand, SCOTUS had cleared the way for the private purchase of thermonuclear weapons over the internet, exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended, but on the other, that such weapons could not (at least for the moment) be purchased by children under 12 without parental consent. So it’s a win for both sides.
It wasn’t as blatantly bad as that, I admit. But the strained attempt to keep things balanced, if only for old time’s sake, was certainly there. Times being what they are now, it did not sit well with me.
But the single most infuriating moment of the report was when the SCOTUS correspondent quoted Chief Justice Roberts defending the 6-3 decision to strike down a 91-year-old precedent that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) other than for reasons of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” In writing for the majority, Roberts argued that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”
It was upon hearing those exact words that my head exploded. Did Chief Justice Roberts actually write what the reporter just claimed he wrote? Could he really have allowed himself to frame the decision in terms of trust?!! The absurdity of the rationale blew my mind. The whole idea of creating multi-member commissions, such as the FTC, as independent agencies in the first place was to ensure that they could be trusted. It is their independence that actually allows the members of the commission to do their work without fear of reprisal. It’s what keeps them from becoming a board of lackeys subservient to the whims of whoever happens to be in power. In a word, the thing that the Supreme Court ruled out by this decision is the one thing that has always allowed us to trust these agencies. Without it, trust disappears.
According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.”
One of the biggest problems in states ruled by autocrats is precisely that: Trust goes missing, becoming a rare commodity desperately sought after, but rarely found. During the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, regional monarchs would invite Cynic philosophers into their courts so that they might have just one person to talk to who could be counted on to tell them the truth. As impoverished beggars, happy in that condition, the Cynics had nothing to gain by lying, nothing to lose by telling the truth. They were independent.
But Chief Justice Roberts would have us believe that he knows better about such things. He and the wiser minds of his Supreme Court treat their legal interpretations as a kind of parlor game played by experts for the sake of theoretical purity and one-upmanship. Like Medieval scholars arguing over how many thorns were in Christ’s crown, they don their robes, play their game, issue their rulings, and retire to their summer homes. Meanwhile, their decisions have consequences in the world outside the parlor that, somehow, aren’t really their concern. No. Their focus is on the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. They are the ones they want to make sure are happy and well cared for by their decisions. They, the long dead, ghosts of their own invention, are the ones that really matter.
In fact, the one non-dead person whom Chief Justice Roberts expressed a keen interest in helping with his decision was just that: one person. The president. Not the demos of our democracy, the voting citizens of this country, to the tune of several hundred million people who are still very much alive. He worried that that one man’s power might be unduly hampered if he were not allowed to fire whomever he wanted for whatever reason. His rationale amounts to a set of quotes from the rule book of a new game that he and his like-minded friends on the court have invented. They play it within his parlor while sipping brandy. It’s called “The Unitary Executive.”
This is a fantasy game, rather like Dungeons and Dragons. In it, the rules of reality outside the parlor, out in the real world, are called off in favor of the rules of the parlor and of the game itself. According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.” It’s all quite wonderful.
To make this game work, Justice Roberts and his parlor friends had to invent an equally fantastical person to do the trusting: a president who has our best interests in mind, one who can always be counted on to act in good faith. This, their game-piece president, is not a vindictive liar, greedy for power. He is a wonderful fiction, good to play with. And so it is that, by relying on the parlor fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power. But not to worry. They assure us that, according to the rules of the game, nothing bad can come of this.
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The Supreme Court's 2026 Term Was a Power Grab in Legal Garb
The term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government to empower the president at the expense of Congress.
Jul 02, 2026
How will we remember this Supreme Court term?
For Louisiana v. Callais, which demolished the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For near misses, too, as when the Constitution’s plain-language guarantee of birthright citizenship was recognized by only a bare majority of the justices. (As JD Vance crowed, that core protection is now “hanging by a thread.”)
I think the term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government. It was a power grab in legal garb, undermining Congress, granting presidents more authority, but with key decisions ultimately in the hands of the nine unelected officials now redesigning government.
In 2005, The New York Times Magazine published a story about a cadre of intense anti-government legal activists. They bemoaned “the Constitution in exile,” what they saw as an epic wrong turn in the 20th century. That was the era when Congress and presidents created expert independent agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to police Wall Street, and the Federal Trade Commission, to protect consumers. To most Americans, that was how we grew a modern, fair, prosperous economy. To those activists, it was all a terrible mistake.
A future president may be a populist progressive, now with new levers of power to address climate change or boost union power. To quote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “What goes around comes around.”
One of the few adherents of this eccentric theory, the Times reported, was an unknown young federal judge named John Roberts. Soon he would become chief justice.
Trump v. Slaughter, announced on Monday, marked a key moment in Roberts’s long drive to write pro-business dogma into the Constitution. On this, Roberts is far from a Midwestern country club Republican cheerfully calling “balls and strikes.” This is not about wins or losses for Donald Trump. These justices have wanted to do this since Trump was cavorting at Studio 54.
Congress established the first independent agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, to set railroad rates in the 1880s. Since then, laws created nearly 60 agencies to police the economy or serve as watchdogs over the government, and tried to wall them off a bit from political pressure and partisan politics.
Congress has now been blocked from imposing removal protections for the heads of most federal agencies, a critical bulwark against presidential meddling. Consider a consequential, complex current question: Could an effective new agency regulate artificial intelligence? The Slaughter ruling could make it considerably harder to insulate such a powerful body from political interference.
Of course, independent agencies are not a purely partisan issue. Over the course of American history, they have frustrated presidents of both parties, who want control of the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
The Slaughter ruling overturned a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor. William Humphrey was a reactionary and thoroughly unpleasant Federal Trade Commission member whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to fire. Humphrey kept going to work even after he was dismissed, then died while the legal challenge to pry him from his office was being heard. His heirs sued for his back pay.
The Supreme Court ruled that even FDR, at the peak of his power, could not fire grumpy old Mr. Humphrey. “That damn little case,” recalled FDR aide Robert Jackson (later a justice himself), “made Roosevelt madder at the court than any other decision... [He] thought they went out of their way to spite him personally.”
Slaughter is one of the most significant expressions of the pretentiously named “unitary executive theory.” This is the idea that because a single individual, the president, is elected to lead the executive branch, that means the whole executive branch serves at his whim. Of note, this case revolved around one aspect of it, firing of agency officials.
Indeed, the justices seemed to recognize the havoc their new doctrine would cause. On the same day, a different lineup of justices blocked Trump from firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. The Fed, too, is an independent agency, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in the Progressive Era, but the rationale for independent central banking is well known. The Cook ruling mumbles about tradition and history, but the real answer for the divergent outcomes seemed to be, well, the Fed is just... different. (Of course, business interests revere the Fed and often loathe the FTC.)
A limited version of the unitary executive theory is not entirely crazy. We want a strong president able to guide the balky executive branch. But advocates have taken this idea to a dangerous extreme, turning it into a fancy cloak for an authoritarian executive. By their logic, if all federal employees work personally for a president, as if they were gardeners at Mar-a-Lago, that could demolish civil service protections and other rules that can keep government from being the instrument of executive whim.
Who knows how far this rhetoric of presidential power will go? Russell Vought, the White House budget director, says we live in a “post-constitutional time.” And in Trump v. United States, Roberts wrote that the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government.”
Policymakers now must grapple with the justices’ handiwork. How can we have strong inspectors general or independent military lawyers if a president can bark “you’re fired” at will? Can Congress step up by, say, giving the Government Accountability Office greater responsibility to police the executive branch? Such obscure questions will determine how government can work going forward. Necessary reforms can follow abuse and scandal. That’s what happened after Watergate. Now such safeguards must be designed in a world where the Supreme Court has supercharged presidential power.
Let’s not forget Donald Trump is a lame duck. (He is! Really!) A future president may be a populist progressive, now with new levers of power to address climate change or boost union power. To quote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “What goes around comes around.” Of course, this court has also invented tools to stop policies it doesn’t like, such as the “major questions” doctrine it used to block Biden-era climate change rules. Stay tuned.
But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this ruling will make government less effective, more chaotic, and more driven by politics and personality—steered there by a Supreme Court with too much power, now in thrall to an obscure and dangerous philosophy.
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Supreme Court Blocking Trump Birthright Citizen Attack a 'Real Relief,' But Also 'Bare Minimum'
"Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights," said one campaigner.
Jun 30, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump's executive order that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents, preserving 150 years of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment and dealing a major blow to the administration's xenophobic agenda.
"Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause," the high court held in Trump v. Barbara.
The 6-3 decision roundly rejected an executive order issued by Trump on the first day of his second term that sought to deny US citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are either unlawfully in the United States or legally living in the country on temporary visas.
Every lower court rejected the order. Just three days after its issuance, US District Judge John Coughenour, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, blasted it as "blatantly unconstitutional."
A majority of the right-wing Supreme Court agreed.
"Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land,'" Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. "We keep that promise today."
Roberts was joined in the majority by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing a separate concurring opinion agreeing that Trump's executive order was unlawful but basing his reasoning on federal immigration law rather than the 14th Amendment.
"As revealed by the court’s opinion with its detailed account of history and precedent, and by the weighty and thoughtful dissents, the constitutional issue is far more complicated than the statutory issue," Kavanaugh wrote.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
"This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the court, and in my judgment, the court has made a serious mistake," Alito wrote in his dissent. "As interpreted by the court today, the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of 'birth tourists,' women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home."
Alito further argued that the 14th Amendment "confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country."
In a 91-page dissent more than three times longer than Roberts' opinion, Thomas wrote that "the court adds to the sad history of the 14th Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed Blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Trump took to his Truth Social network to lament, "The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process."
"No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!" he added. "Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!"
Stephen Miller, Trump's xenophobic deputy chief of staff, seethed on X that Trump v. Barbara is "one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court."
"American citizenship is not the birthright of the world," the white nationalist added. "It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration."
Defenders of birthright citizenship and the Constitution welcomed the ruling.
"The Supreme Court affirmed what we know in our hearts and in our communities: The 14th Amendment extends the promise of citizenship to everyone born in the US Immigrants belong," Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.), a birthright citizen, said on Bluesky. "No one can deny that immigrants today are also the inheritors of the promise of America—just like so many of my colleagues' ancestors were."
I am the proud, defiant daughter of Maria Elvira Ramirez Guerra, a Guatemalan immigrant who crossed the border pregnant with me. Regardless of what some of my colleagues might call me, I am a citizen by birthright and an AMERICAN!
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— Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez (@ramirez.house.gov) June 30, 2026 at 8:58 AM
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a former refugee from Somalia, said on social media: "The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, blocking Trump's attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment and strip away a constitutional guarantee. If you were born here, you are an American citizen. The Constitution is clear. No one can change that."
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick called the decision "the easiest of layups possible."
Thomas Wolf, director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that "the court could not have defensibly ruled any differently."
"The 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to everyone born here over 150 years ago," he added. "The Supreme Court affirmed that 20 years later in Wong Kim Ark."
ACLU national legal director Cecilia Wang, a birthright citizen who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the decision "reaffirms a fundamental American promise—if you are born here, you are a citizen. A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.”
Neidi Dominguez, executive director of the multiracial advocacy group Organized Power in Numbers, said that "today the Supreme Court reaffirmed a constitutional right that should never have been in question."
"Birthright citizenship was guaranteed through the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, when formerly enslaved Africans and their allies fought to access equal rights and affirm that children born in the United States have citizenship regardless of where their parents come from," she noted. "That right survives today."
"But let us be clear about what happened here," Dominguez continued. "The Trump administration tried to narrow the definition of citizenship and the access to the rights that come with it, and even this Supreme Court disagreed. This is a real relief, and it is welcome. It is also the bare minimum."
"The same court that today defended birthright citizenship last week stripped legal protections from more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian workers with [temporary protected status] and opened the door to doing the same to up to 1.3 million people," she said. "Earlier this term, it cleared the way for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers. Working people are not safe because one constitutional right survived. They are fighting on every front."
"Birthright citizenship is protected today. But the workers whose children depend on it still face deportation, worksite raids, and an administration that has made clear it will use every tool available to make immigrant workers afraid, isolated, and stripped of their rights," Dominguez added. "Employers cannot stay silent while the workers they depend on are stripped of their rights one ruling at a time. We are not done fighting."
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the pro-democracy group Common Cause, issued a statement saying, “While we welcome the court finally upholding a constitutional amendment ratified nearly two centuries ago, upholding the law is no cause for celebration, it is a requirement."
“Let today be a stark reminder that this court continues to systematically dismantle voting protections for Black and brown communities, tilting the scales of justice toward a dark era where a wealthy, privileged few dictate the rules for the rest of us," she added. "Today may be a brief victory for the rule of law, but our fight to protect our multiracial democracy continues.”
Wolf at the Brennan Center said that “today’s ruling is the right one amid an avalanche of Supreme Court opinions undermining our democracy."
“In just the past few weeks alone, the court further undermined the Voting Rights Act, encouraged more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, dangerously expanded presidential power over federal agencies, and further depleted protections for immigrants," he noted. "This ruling does not make up for all the damage the court has done this term.”
On Tuesday, the court also ruled that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at schools receiving public funding.
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Supreme Court Gives Trump 'King-Like' Power to Purge Independent Agencies
“Today’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter takes a wrecking ball to a 90-year pillar of American law," said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin.
Jun 29, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Monday upheld President Donald Trump's firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning 90 years of precedent and giving the chief executive what dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor called "a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted."
Last March, Trump fired Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two Democratic FTC commissioners at the time, without cause in what critics called yet another illegal abuse of power by the twice-impeached convicted felon.
Under the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA) of 1914, a president may only fire FTC commissioners "for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Supreme Court's 1935 Humphrey's Executor v. United States ruling interpreted the FTCA to mean that the president could not remove an FTC commissioner for any other reason, such as a policy disagreement.
The justices shredded that precedent with Monday's 6-3 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which found that "the FTC's for-cause removal provision is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution."
BREAKING: The Supreme Court upholds Trump’s firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause.The decision overturns a 90-year-old precedent that protected the heads or board members of independent agencies from arbitrary presidential dismissals. Full story to come.
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— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) June 29, 2026 at 7:20 AM
Chief Justice John Roberts joined fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—the last three appointed by Trump—in the majority, while liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Delivering the court's opinion, Roberts wrote that the "Humphrey's framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time."
"We long ago abandoned the notion that there are some powers that are only partly executive," the chief justice asserted. "Forty years have now passed, in fact, since we recognized that the FTC exercises executive power—and did so even in 1935, when Humphrey's was decided."
Slaughter and officials at independent executive agencies, Roberts wrote, "exercise the president’s power, not their own, and thus must be responsible to him."
"At this point, all that is left of Humphrey's is its observation that an agency that 'exercises no part of the executive power' need not fall within the rule of presidential removal," he added. "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it."
As she did last week with Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, a 6-3 ruling that affirmed Trump's deadly policy of blocking people legally seeking asylum from entering the United States, Sotomayor took the rare step of reading her dissent in Slaughter from the bench.
"Today, this court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong," she asserted. "The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the long-standing practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of commissions like the FTC can be removed by the president."
"In holding otherwise, the court gives the president a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws," she continued.
"If nothing else, the doctrine of stare decisis, which today’s decision cursorily dismisses, should have made this a profoundly easy case under Humphrey’s," Sotomayor added, referring to the Latin legal term for "to stand by things decided," or precedent.
Responding to the ruling, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said that “today’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter takes a wrecking ball to a 90-year pillar of American law and to Congress’ power to create independent expert agencies that serve the will of the American people as expressed in federal law rather than the whimsical political agenda of one president."
“In overturning Congress’ authority to prevent the president from removing the leaders of independent agencies at whim, the court’s right-wing majority has given President Trump sweeping new power to purge Senate-confirmed commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and other independent agencies for no reason other than personal loyalty, political obedience, or refusal to bend the law to the personal will of the president," Raskin added. "This decision invites presidential domination of the independent agencies Congress created to protect the people against corporate fraud, financial corruption, attacks on workers’ rights, and other abuses of concentrated economic and political power."
Numerous civil society groups and constitutional experts also expressed alarm over Monday's ruling, which follows the high court's previous affirmations of expanded executive power in cases including Trump v. United States. Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority in that 2024 case that the president enjoys prosecutorial immunity for all "official acts"—which Sotomayor said in her dissent made him "a king above the law."
“Independent agencies are the guardians of American consumers, workers, and investors," Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said of Trump v. Slaughter. "They have held wealthy corporations that rip off hardworking Americans accountable and forced dangerous products from the market. Having stripped most independent agencies of their independence, President Trump is already politicizing and weaponizing them, including agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission, to the detriment of everyday Americans.”
At Issue One, a group dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics, vice president of advocacy Alix Fraser said that “today, the Supreme Court greenlit further abuses of presidential power and stripped independent commissions of their independence."
"The ruling opens the floodgates for more governing decisions based on the president’s whims and self-interest," he added. "This ruling not only subverts the Constitution’s clear guardrails against executive overreach, it also breaks from the court’s historical precedent to uphold the FTC removal provision."
The Slaughter case, overturning precedent, returns us to a spoils system where a president can “clean house” every four years, destroying our professional, independent civil service.
— Barb McQuade (@barbmcquade.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 8:31 AM
Leah Greenberg, co-executive director at the pro-democracy group Indivisible, issued a statement calling the ruling "shocking, but sadly not surprising."
"John Roberts and the MAGA majority are willing to set fire to history, precedent, and any consistent constitutional principle in order to give Trump more power with less oversight," she said. "This brazen, undemocratic partisanship and corruption must be investigated, the justices must be held accountable, and the court must be reformed to disempower the current anti-constitutional majority.”
Brett Edkins, managing director of policy and affairs at the anti-corruption watchdog Stand Up America—which said the ruling "opens the door to king-like powers for Trump to fire independent watchdogs and install loyalists throughout government"—lamented that “the MAGA Supreme Court just overturned a century of law to give more power to Donald Trump."
"Trump couldn’t find a lawful reason to fire a member of an independent agency, so he ignored the law, fired them anyway, and turned to his allies on the Supreme Court to reward his gross abuses of executive power," he continued. "His lackeys on the court obliged."
“Today’s ruling hands Trump sweeping power to purge independent watchdogs and install loyalists throughout the US government who will answer to him alone," Edkins added.
Republicans have long sought a repeal of Humphrey's. Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government—calls for the ruling to be overturned.
Trump welcomed Monday's decision with a post on his Truth Social network claiming that he personally "won" the ruling.
Monday's decision means Trump will now be able to fire at will leaders from agencies including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and US Postal Service.
But not the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. That's because in a separate but related ruling released on Monday, the justices rejected Trump's attempt to oust Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook, finding 5-4 in Trump v. Cook that his bid to fire her did not comply with the Federal Reserve Act's for-cause removal protections.
“The court’s decision in Slaughter is all the more peculiar in light of... Trump v. Cook," Raskin said in his statement."There, the court rightly rejected President Trump’s lawless attempt to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook without adequate cause, due process, or judicial review."
While acknowledging that "central bank independence matters immensely to the American economy," Raskin contended that "Congress' constitutional judgments about the necessity of institutional independence should matter just as much at the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and the many other important independent agencies Congress has created to serve the interests of the American people."
Humphrey's Executor is dead and the president can fire anyone in the executive branch at will but NOT Federal Reserve governors is really a parody of the difference between the money power and everything else in America
— David Dayen (@ddayen.bsky.social) June 29, 2026 at 7:20 AM
Indivisible's Greenberg said that “the carveout for the Federal Reserve only shows how grossly political" the Slaughter decision is.
"Apparently, independence only matters when financial markets are at stake," she added, "but not when agencies are protecting consumers, workers, or the public from corporate abuse."
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The Roberts Court Is Pushing the US Toward Existential Conflict
By gutting the Voting Rights Act and granting President Donald Trump irmmunity, the Supreme Court has helped set up a fight over the future of US democracy.
May 24, 2026
Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of non-white voters say they fear rising white supremacy.
While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion’s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, and gun control to affirmative action and abortion rights. The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation’s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.
The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power.
The court’s 6-3 majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito invalidated Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black congressional district to operate alongside the state’s five white-majority districts, roughly reflecting the size of Louisiana’s Black population. The ruling handed a victory to the lead plaintiff in the case, Phillip “Bert” Callais, an election denier and alleged conspiracy theorist who had attended the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally on the White House Ellipse that eventually snowballed into the insurrection at the Capitol. Barely concealing their racial animus, Callais and his co-plaintiffs described themselves in court filings as “non-African American voters” who were the victims of reverse discrimination. Louisiana has since moved to redraw its voting maps.
Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history.
With the demise of the “effects test,” future Section 2 plaintiffs will have to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps were created with overt discriminatory intent rather than for political purposes. And as the court held in a 2019 opinion written by Roberts in Rucho v. Common Cause, political gerrymandering claims cannot be brought in federal courts because, as the Republican majority sees it, they present nonjusticiable “political questions.”
Both Callais and Rucho built upon Roberts’ 2013 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Alabama gutting two other sections of the VRA that required state and local jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as preclearance—before making changes to their election procedures. Like Alito in Callais, Roberts declared in Shelby that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past and thus special protections for minorities were no longer necessary.
The combined effects of Shelby and Rucho have led to a proliferation of voting roll purges, onerous photo ID laws, and limitations on mail-in ballots in red states across the country. Now, with Callais, election law experts predict that as many as 19 Democratic congressional seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, returning the former states of the Confederacy to one-party rule.
The court’s handiwork has sparked outrage and alarm. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation, who will likely lose his seat to gerrymandering, has condemned Callais as “equivalent to a second Civil War.” Other observers have compared the current moment in the US to the 1850s, when debates over the future of slavery eventually led to secession and war.
Chief Justice Roberts has also drawn comparisons to Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision helped precipitate the Civil War, and is widely considered the most infamous in the court’s history.
The parallels between Taney and Roberts are beyond hyperbole. Both men began their legal careers as zealous partisan political advocates. Before ascending to the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and later served as a loyal foot soldier to President Andrew Jackson, first as secretary of war and then as attorney general, in which capacity he penned an advisory opinion that prefigured his Dred Scott ruling, arguing that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were inapplicable to Black people, even those living in free states.
Similarly, the young Roberts established himself as a dependable right-wing operative, clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and afterward serving as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration. There, he authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 amendment that added the effects test to the Voting Rights Act in addition to ghosting op-eds for Smith and preparing administration officials for their testimony before Congress on the test. Later, as an attorney in private practice, he played an important role as a consultant, lawsuit editor, and prep coach for the GOP’s legal arguments in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts’ lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history. As the civil rights activist and writer William Spivey argued in an essay published earlier this month in the online journal Level:
Taney held that no Black person, free or enslaved, could ever be a US citizen. He believed that Black people were not part of the political community and the Constitution was written for white men only.
Chief Justice Roberts has been more effective than anyone in disenfranchising Black people. Most of what Taney accomplished can be traced to a single decision that remained in place for 11 years before being reversed [by the 13th and 14th Amendments]. Roberts has spent an entire career whittling away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and, most recently, the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement.
Roberts will also be remembered for composing the majority opinion in Trump v. United States in 2024 that gave the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. That decision, along with the evisceration of voting rights, has emboldened Trump to threaten the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to polling places and hatch other plots to rig the midterm elections and consolidate Republican power.
It may be premature to conclude a new Civil War is upon us, but a high-stakes battle for the future of the country is well underway.
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John Roberts Is George Wallace With a Harvard Law Degree
What the infamous segregationist from Alabama could not accomplish with violence, the US Supreme Court Justice has accomplished with a pen.
May 04, 2026
George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson who was unarmed and protecting his mother.
In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as "Bloody Sunday" as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis' skull and sending 57 others to the hospital. Televised images of the brutal attack shocked the nation, directly leading to President Johnson's push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Numerous Americans, black and white, were injured and even died fighting for the Civil Rights Act. John Roberts and his five Republican Supreme Court colleagues effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act and essentially disenfranchised black voters.
George Wallace tried to disenfranchise black voters with violent state troopers. Roberts disenfranchised black voters with the stroke of a pen. It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
In her dissent to Louisiana v. Callais in which the 6-member Republican majority of the Court effectively overturned Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality." Kagan concluded, " I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”
But the Court didn't destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.
Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan's Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.
Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was "the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes."
Despite the efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan administration, Congress passed the Amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. Little did anyone imagine at the time that Roberts would become Chief Justice and the leader of right-wing Justices' ultimately successful efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act as he had initially set out to do as a young Justice Department official.
At his confirmation hearing, Roberts told the Senate "The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld and I don't have any issue with that." He was lying.
In 2013, Roberts got his first shot at dismantling the Civil Rights Act. In his 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder, he overturned Section 5 of the Act , which required that states with a history of racist voter suppression pre-clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to be sure they were not reinstituting racial suppression. He argued that it was no longer necessary since racism in America had diminished since the Act had been passed. In response, many states previously subject to preclearance rushed to enact new voter suppression laws.
In coming years, the Roberts Court further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. But Roberts finally got his opportunity to make the rest of the Voting Rights Act a nullity when Louisiana v. Calais came before the Court this year. In a 6-3 opinion, which Roberts assigned to his anti-voting rights ally Justice Samuel Alito, the Court overruled the other crown jewel of the Voting Rights Act which had previously held that racially gerrymandered districts were illegal if they had racially discriminatory effect. Instead, racially gerrymandered districts would only be illegal if it can be proven that they have a racially discriminatory intent, a bar that is almost impossible to clear.
This was the argument that Roberts first made as a young Justice Department attorney back in 1982. As Chief Justice, he finally succeeded in his long campaign to revoke the Civil Rights Act.
Meanwhile, if a state can claim that it's gerrymandering is motivated by ensuring that its political party wins, it's totally cool with the Roberts Court. With the Court overturning both Section 2 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it effectively repealed the entire Voting Rights Act that so many had fought and died for.
The very next day, Florida passed a redistricting law that would allow for new levels of gerrymandering designed to erase districts with large populations of black voters.
Roberts accomplished with a pen what George Wallace had tried to accomplish with violent state troopers.
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Blame John Roberts for This Anti-Democratic Redistricting War
It's obvious to a majority of ordinary Americans that partisan gerrymandering undermines fundamental democratic principles. If only the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court would have the courage to admit it.
Apr 25, 2026
In the short run, Democrats' victory in gerrymandering Virginia to create four new blue Congressional districts is a good thing. It will restore balance to the critical 2026 House elections to offset Republicans' Texas gerrymandering which created four new red districts.
President Donald Trump was technically right when the night before the Virginia vote he told a conference of supporters, “I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is but it’s not good.” Of course what Trump really meant is that gerrymandering is bad when it disenfranchises Republicans but good when it disenfranchises Democrats.
Here's what we do know: partisan gerrymandering is an affront to democracy by letting politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians. Given Republicans' successful gerrymandering, the Virginia gerrymander was the least bad immediate option. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a sharp reversal of recent establishment Democrats' attitude, "When they go low, we strike back."
But looking forward, partisan gerrymandering should be illegal. As Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent to Chief Justice John Roberts' 2019 majority ruling that partisan gerrymandering is non-judiciable, “partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.”
You can blame John Roberts for debasing and dishonoring our democracy and irreparably damaging our system of government.
In his 5-4 majority decision in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, Roberts ruled that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are "political questions" that courts may not interfere with. Roberts may have disingenuously claimed in his confirmation hearings that he is nothing but an umpire calling balls and strikes, but in reality he changes the strike zone to favor Republicans.
Partisan gerrymandering blatantly violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Partisan gerrymandering treats voters of the then minority party in a state unequally to voters of the then majority party and gives the then majority party an unequal advantage in securing their future electoral control regardless of the will of the voters. Voters from different parties do not have an equal chance to affect the outcome of elections. As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent to Rucho a voter's constitutional equal protections rights“can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.”
It's obvious to a majority of ordinary Americans that partisan gerrymandering undermines fundamental democratic principles. An August 2025 Reuters poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, thought that the partisan gerrymandering taking place in Texas and California are "bad for democracy." Regular Americans understand the dangers of partisan gerrymandering better than John Roberts in his lengthy "legal" opinion that courts can't do anything to prevent it.
Since Rucho was decided in 2019, advances in computer algorithms have enabled the majority party in a state to construct voting districts to virtually guarantee with surgical precision their own electoral victory.
If Roberts and his Republican cohorts on the Court were honest, they would consider revisiting and overturning Rucho and giving lower courts the power to devise standards for deciding if a partisan gerrymander is too much. But given the partisanship of the Republican Justices, that's unlikely to happen.
If, despite the disadvantages of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats regain control of Congress, they should enact legislation term limiting SCOTUS justices (after which they may keep their lifetime judicial tenure by taking senior status) and increasing the number of Justices from 9 to at least 12. This can be done by legislation and does not need to overcome the nearly impossible bar of a Constitutional Amendment. To protect democracy, Court reform should be a key part of Democrats' political platform.
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The Tariff Ruling Shows the Roberts Court Is More Pro-Corporate Than Pro-Trump
The mainstream media, and even much of the progressive media, is misinterpreting the tariff decision as demonstrating the Roberts Court's independence and judicial neutrality. Instead, it demonstrates the court's true masters.
Feb 24, 2026
The US Supreme Court's rejection of President Donald Trump's singular policy on tariffs is a reason for some celebration. During the past year, using the so-called "shadow docket," the Roberts Court had ruled in Trump's favor on an emergency basis 24 out of 28 times.
But the mainstream media, and even much of the progressive media, is misinterpreting the tariff decision as demonstrating the Roberts Court's independence and judicial neutrality.
For example, the New York Times lead article by its chief legal correspondent Adam Lipnick was headlined, "The Supreme Court's Declaration of Independence," and the article argued that SCOTUS's decision "amounted to a declaration of independence." One progressive blogger wrote, "It would be nice—and, in political terms, smart—if the left changes its tune about Roberts in the wake of his courageous stand." An article in the generally liberal Atlantic magazine was headlined, "The Supreme Court Isn't a Rubber Stamp."
But the Roberts Court is not independent. Rather, when there's a conflict between big corporations and Trump, it will side with the corporations.
Most of the media is getting the meaning of the tariffs case wrong.
The plaintiffs challenging the tariffs were represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance funded by billionaire Charles Koch and former Federalist Society chief Leonard Leo who selected the right-wing Justices. Even The Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief opposing the Trump tariffs and asking the Roberts Court to overturn them.
In most cases that don't threaten corporate interests, the Roberts Court sides with Trump. However, as with the tariff decisions, in cases soon to be decided on whether Trump can fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause—which threatens business interests—oral arguments indicate they will probably side with the business interests and rule that the Fed is a special case and the president cannot fire a Fed governor without cause. But they will likely bend themselves into pretzels to hold that Trump can fire without cause the heads of most other agencies like the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board, which regulate business and which corporate interests want kneecapped..
Most of the media is getting the meaning of the tariffs case wrong. It does not show that the Roberts Court is independent. Rather, it shows that the Roberts Court is pro-corporate.
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Blame the Escalating Gerrymander Wars on Chief Justice John Roberts
Nobody has done more damage to US democracy and voting rights in the 21st Century than this one despicable jurist.
Oct 16, 2025
America is currently at war over partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature has just gerrymandered voting districts to create five more safe Republican US House seats, as demanded by Trump.
Then Missouri Republicans were ordered by Trump to enact a gerrymander to increase the states' disproportionate Republican minority from 6-2 to 7-1 by cutting Democratic-leaning Kansas City voting districts down the middle. Now JD Vance is urging Indiana Republicans to gerrymander the only two remaining Democratic House districts out of existence.
In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a ballot measure that would temporarily suspend California's independent redistricting commission until 2030 and let the Democratic legislature redistrict Republicans out of five seats to match what Republicans have done in Texas.
A large majority of voters nationally don't think partisan gerrymandering should be legal. According to a recent YouGov poll, 69% of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% think it should be legal.
Chief Justice John Roberts (and all of his Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court) disagree with this vast majority of Americans. In 2019, Roberts' 5-4 majority opinion in Rucho v Common Cause (joined by the four other Republicans on the Court) held that federal courts do not have the constitutional power to prevent partisan gerrymandering and restored blatantly partisan gerrymanders in North Carolin and Maryland.
Since Roberts' decision, partisan gerrymandering has exploded. According to Michael Li of the Brennan Center, partisan gerrymandering has given Republicans 16 extra seats in the House. Without that, Democrats would have a House majority and Republicans would not be able to pass the so-called "big beautiful bill" which has led to a government shutdown. As the Brennan Center states, "Gerrymandering decided House control."
Roberts' opinion conceded that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic institutions” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But Roberts then invented a procedural technicality to bar Federal courts from doing anything about it or to uphold the Constitutional principle of "one person, one vote." Roberts claimed that partisan gerrymandering is a so-called "political question" that Federal Courts have no right to question and must be left to the states. Of course, when one party controls the state legislature, they have every incentive to draw voting districts to guarantee they never lose political power, no matter what the view of the voters is. Voters don't get to pick their own legislators. Instead, legislators get to pick their voters. In her dissent—joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer—Justice Kagan wrote:
"For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because he thinks the task is beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the right participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance their political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy...enabl[ing] politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences...They encouraged a politics of polarization and disfunction."
Is it any wonder that a NY Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33% of voters believe that America's political system can still address the nation's problems, while 64% believe the political system is too politically divided to solve the nation's problems?
As former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lisa Graves argues in a new book, "[i]n the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve."
Citizens have no power to overturn a US Supreme Court decision. However, California citizens have the ability to equalize Texas Republicans' gerrymander of five House seats. On November 4, they can pass Proposition 50 which lets the State legislature temporarily draw new congressional district maps through 2030, at which point the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume control of redistricting, and supports nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.
It won't completely block John Roberts' 20-year long project to undermine democracy and judicially enact the increasingly MAGA Republican agenda. (It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a "judicial coup".) Indeed, this week SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case where it appears that Roberts will lead the Republican majority to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which protects the right of Black voters to have electoral representation. Such a ruling could likely flip as many as 19 House seats from Democratic to Republican, cementing a Republican House majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of the will of the voters.
Passing Proposition 50 is one thing Californians can do to fight back against Justice Roberts' undemocratic judicial campaign, which has helped enable Trump's authoritarianism. Mail-in ballots have already been sent out so California voters can cast "Yes" votes for Proposition 50 from now until November 4. Beyond that, thanks to John Roberts and his Republican colleagues on SCOTUS, other Blue states will have to be brought into the gerrymander wars and enact their own partisan gerrymanders to balance Republican gerrymanders to the extent possible.
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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 landmarkVoting 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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