How Chief Justice Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Wins
How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak
Behind the scenes, the chief justice molded three momentous Jan. 6 and election cases that helped determine the former president’s fate.
The Real Story: Roberts’ Influence
The headline itself is classic Times misdirection. The real story is how Chief Justice Roberts worked behind the scenes and maneuvered the other members of the court into handing down rulings that essentially gave Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Entangled in Presidential Politics
In a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases last term, the court found itself more entangled in presidential politics than at any time since the 2000 election. The chief justice responded by using his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision-making.
This account draws on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings, and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.
Media Silence
Read the whole thing. This should have been front-page news and all over the media for days. Roberts should be under intense pressure. Instead, we’re talking about dogs and cats—which is just the way Trump and the GOP want it.
Could it be the news media isn’t comfortable reporting that the highest court in the land has been totally politicized? Jodi Cantor and Adam Liptak have done a remarkable job putting this story together. It must be incredibly frustrating for them to see it barely making a ripple.
Key Sections
Here’s one of the key sections:
Chief Justice Roberts’s language in the opinion seemed intended to stay above the fray, extending protections to “all occupants of the Oval Office, regardless of politics, policy or party.” But in a withering dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the majority opinion gave Mr. Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.” It also, she wrote, protected “treasonous acts,” transformed the president into “a king above the law” and ultimately caused her to “fear for our democracy.”
The court’s leader shot back that the liberal justices “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.”
That last bit from Roberts is akin to Trump and Vance complaining Democrats telling the truth about them is inciting violence and should stop—while the two of them constantly use eliminationist rhetoric to talk about Harris and Democrats in general. It’s what the Right has been doing for decades.
Roberts: Not a Moderate Consensus Builder
Any thoughts anyone ever had that Chief Justice John Roberts was the moderate consensus builder on the court should be thrown right into the rubbish bin. According to a new shocking NY Times expose, it is Roberts who pushed the three big decisions protecting Trump from accountability for his crimes.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion in all three cases including the unsigned order that forbade Colorado from removing Trump from the ballot. And apparently he took the majority opinion in Fischer (the one that said prosecutors couldn’t bring obstruction charges against some of the J6 insurrectionists) from Alito after it was reported that his wingnut wife Martha Ann had been flying an upside-down flag after January 6th. My God.
And Roberts insisted, over the objections of even some of the conservatives, that the immunity case be held before the election, siding with the liberals. But once he got the vote he basically told the liberals to pound sand. There would be no compromise with them to try to form a consensus which partially explains the level of anger in Sotomayor’s dissent.
Charlie Pierce’s Take
Charlie Pierce also has a few things to say:
I confess, I fell for Chief Justice John Roberts’s whole shtick for longer than I should have. That whole “institutionalist” jive got by me far too easily. The presence on the Supreme Court of obvious hacks like Mr. Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Alito obscured the fact that Roberts is one of them. Over the weekend, The New York Times turned on all the lights.
The NYT apparently was presented with a massive leak of the internal Court documenting exactly the size of the thumb Roberts put on the scale as regards the destabilizing constitutional heresy that is U.S. v. Trump.
This breach of Court secrecy is every bit as unprecedented as the preview we got of Justice Alito’s torching of Roe v. Wade. It is further evidence that the Court is cracking up, but this time, Roberts doesn’t have the excuse of being the hall monitor in Bedlam.
Weaponizing the Judiciary
Republicans and the billionaires backing them have weaponized the judiciary. Part of the long game being played here is how Republicans and their wealthy backers have spent decades staging a slow-motion judicial coup to overturn the rule of law. It’s not just the Supreme Court. They’ve installed activist judges at all levels of government to shape the way laws are enforced and to steal power away from the legislative and executive branches of government.
Let Democrats pass a law that Republicans don’t like, let a Democratic executive take an action they are against, and they turn to lawfare to block it. Red State attorney generals will band together to block actions at the Federal Level, and act within their own states to go after state and lower levels of government that draw their ire.
They’ll go shopping for activist judges that will rule the way they want, and work the appeals process to go all the way up to their Supreme Court to get a ruling that will enforce their agenda across the nation. They have pipelines to fast track the process. They’ll bring lawsuits and indictments intended to exhaust the financial resources of their targets and silence them even though they know the cases have no real merit.
The clearest proof that this is happening is the way Republicans are accusing Democrats of doing it—pure projection.
Reforming the Supreme Court
At the very least, reforming the Supreme Court should be a huge issue, and ditto for the way the courts have been weaponized, affecting the lives of so many ordinary citizens for the benefit of a few. It should be an easy case to make. That The NY Times was able to find so many people willing to risk their careers and their lives to try to expose this shows the people who know what’s happening are freaking out over what’s happening.
It would be nice if the media would do its damn job, and it would be nice if Democrats find an effective way to make that case. It’s no coincidence that Trump and Vance are inciting violence to distract us all away from the bigger threats they pose.
