It's difficult to read any of this new CNN piece on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts without feeling gaslit by everyone involved: by Roberts, by Roberts' unnamed "colleagues," by the reporter, by the headline writer—it feels like every single player here is engaged in their own sub-variety of Just Trolling Us Outright.
I mean, come on with this.
From the moment he was confirmed in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts made it his mission to differentiate the Supreme Court from the political branches. Yet, the court is ensnared in politics perhaps more than ever – and by the chief’s own hand.
The former star appellate lawyer who allies once cast as the smartest person in the room remains confounded by the realities of Donald Trump.
Roberts was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.
Really now. Really, Roberts was "shaken" by the public outrage—the most vocal of it coming from legal and Constitutional experts—that followed his bizarre and thoroughly unasked for treatise vastly expanding the abilities of presidents to commit crimes and snub their noses at anyone who tries to hold them to account. When faced with the first genuine attempt to overthrow the United States government since the Civil War, all of it for the purposes of soothing a rich asshole's inflated ego and allowing his collection of assembled fascist toadies to ignore a constitutional election and remain in power regardless of their election loss, Roberts chose that moment and that case to wax on about how Gosh, Actually, perhaps launching a coup against the government could be considered an official presidential duty if the shitbird in charge scribbled out the plan on an "official" White House napkin...
...and Roberts was, we are to believe, caught off guard by the vast majority of legal scholars and public non-scholars seeing it as an egregious and crooked attempt to immunize the coup-attempters and describe a path by which they could best succeed in their ongoing attempts this time around.
That claim, if it is indeed accurate, leaves us with only two possible interpretations of events. Either Roberts is, truly, among the most vapid, hollow-headed and stupid Americans to ever be appointed to the bench, to be caught so unawares, or the man has crawled so far up his own colon that he no longer can see the sky. Dear God, he was surprised by this outcome?
Unlike most of the justices, he made no public speeches over the summer. Colleagues and friends who saw him said he looked especially weary, as if carrying greater weight on his shoulders. On Monday, after he ascended the bench to formally open a new session, Roberts hewed to a familiar script and kept any emotion in check.
Oh, horseshit. Give me a break. Systemically disrupting all of government to instead deliver a stream of far-right rulings law professors have already given up attempting to defend really takes a lot of stamina, apparently. Or perhaps it's just the strain of realizing that his "smartest person in the room" persona is now so buried under the mountain of his own decisions that he'll never, ever be getting it back.
This is a fraught time for America’s highest court, as divisive rulings mount and controversy persists over the justices’ lack of an enforceable ethics code.
Are we being gaslit here? Is the reporter just screwing with us? This "fraught time" is entirely of the court's own making, and could be solved tomorrow by Actually Having An Enforceable Ethics Code. Instead the justices have doubled down time and again, issuing new rulings and giving new speeches weakening anti-corruption standards every time they've been asked. Clarence Thomas and the other justices don't look all that weary; apparently being gifted free vacations from billionaires really freshens a person up.
If the court's going to decline to impose ethical standards on itself after a stream of scandals, then it's not exactly fraught times for anyone involved. It feels a lot more like at least a few of the justices have been romping through Willy Wonka's factory taking a bite out of things and laughing about how comeuppance will never, ever be comeupping for them.
But perhaps the more significant immediate test of Roberts’ leadership will be litigation around the November 5 presidential election and the counting of votes.
Right, the thing Roberts paved the way for with his evasive hand-waving over whether an organized campaign of false propaganda designed to justify the illegal nullification of an American election counted as a "presidential" power. That thing. However will Roberts rule this time around, having been so shaken by public scorn earlier in the year?
The Roberts Court has been in sync with the GOP political agenda largely because of decisions the chief justice has authored: For Trump and other Republicans. Against voting rights and racial affirmative action. Against federal regulations over environmental, public health and consumer affairs.
Oh wait, I think that might be a clue.
Roberts’ pattern of favoring GOP interests has been entrenched by his decisions in such cases as the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder (gutting part of the Voting Rights Act) and the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause (preventing US courts from stopping political parties from gerrymandering voting districts to their advantage).
Huh, it kinda feels like there's a pattern here, when it comes to letting crooked racists bend elections using false pretenses.
But the politically charged valence deepened in the justices’ resolution of the case against former President Trump on election-interference charges from 2020. The court’s protracted action, even before its July 1 decision, ensured that Trump’s trial would not occur before his renewed bid for the White House, now against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
I WONDER HOW THIS NEW TEST OF ROBERTS' "LEADERSHIP" WILL PLAY OUT. WHO AMONG US CAN SAY.
See, this is what I mean. This entire article has been written to portray Roberts as the weary warrior attempting to navigate through these treacherous waters that he himself has been steering into for years and years, the man who was caught entirely off-guard when he used a long-delayed ruling to issue expansive new protections for a felonious seditionist who orchestrated a violent attack on Congress, the man who is definitely quite certainly troubled by his court visibly descending into a pit of almost comic corruption caused entirely by his refusal to Stop Fucking Digging—to portray that guy as the victim of his own actions rather than the perpetrator.
And now we apparently are supposed to be earnestly wondering how Roberts will "navigate" a Bush v. Gore-like potential ruling in which he and his fellow hard-right enablers of conservative crookedness will have to decide which votes "count" and which ones they'll have to block from being counted, when Trump and his co-conspirators inevitably claim super-magic-ultra-fraud occurred and demand the court settle things for them.
Dozens of Republican-generated lawsuits against state election practices are making their way through lower courts. Any litigation that is truly consequential in the Trump-Harris battle is likely to force the justices into rapid decision-making against tight deadlines.
I'm not convinced these assholes could manage a lunch order without spending six weeks meditating over it first.
The possibility of another Bush v. Gore hangs over the court. In that 2000 case testing which candidate could claim Florida’s crucial electoral votes, the court ruled for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush over then-Vice President Al Gore. The 5-4 decision fell along the justices’ ideological, if not political, lines.
Oh look, another possible clue.
Roberts, who had served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and was in private practice at the time, assisted George W. Bush’s legal team. After Bush took the White House, he appointed Roberts to a US appellate court. In 2005, he elevated Roberts to the Supreme Court to succeed William Rehnquist, for whom Roberts had once worked.
AND THERE WE GO. Jesus it took a long time to get there.
So what we have here is, apparently, an article written solely for the purpose of driving the rest of us completely insane. We are presented a much-truncated litany of instances in which Chief Justice John Roberts has brushed off ethics complaints, authored or endorsed some of the most consequential savagings of precedent to instead usher in a new era when nobody knows what the law will be from one month to the next because it depends entirely on whether the person asking is a Federalist Society friend or a Federalist Society enemy, and has repeatedly weakened protections against political corruption and electoral sabotage explicitly, and somehow all of this is being balled up into a new article telling us how damn tiring it's been for Roberts to keep pulling off this shit and being criticized in response.
The whole last bit of the article is even a defense in which we hear that no, no, Roberts sincerely didn't mean to immunize the architect of a violent coup against consequences for his actions, Roberts just thought that a case involving the most consequential coup attempt since, again, the Civil War was a good time to wax on about all the hypothetical cases in which such a person could maybe not be prosecuted no matter what you thought about that—that being, naturally, the thing Roberts figured the American citizenry would be abso-fking-lutely most interested in hearing about as the coup architect loudly repeated each past step leading to the coup attempt the last time around.
“There’s ambiguity as to the scope of the immunity,” [former Roberts clerk Roman Martinez] said. “There’s sorta question marks across different aspects of the opinion on what it means. … We haven’t seen the ending yet.”
Oh my God they are screwing with us on purpose. Sure, that's what we're going with. The mind of John Roberts is a vast nebulous place; just because it's happened to wander to the most beneficial and extremist of pro-Republican ideological stances in all of these many cases we all remember and were horrified by does not mean he will do the obviously partisan thing twenty times in a row.
Who are articles like this for? I am genuinely asking. The vast majority of the public does not give a shit whether John Roberts was "shaken" by scholars comparing his Trump-backing decision to Dred Scott. Whether the man looks "weary," as he steers the court through any and all attempts to get Clarence Thomas to not be so obviously goddamn crooked for a bit, is similarly uninteresting.
And while it is perhaps good to get another reminder that Roberts has been quite steady in his coincidental-but-not-really siding with far-right ideologues in unwinding the last century of stitched-together social fabric, it is bizarre to have his future willingness to do the same written off as an unknowable. We know it. The man has broadcast his intentions at every step; his immunization of Trump was quite detailed in mentioning hypotheticals helpful to Trump's defense even though none of it was truly required by the ruling. Roberts sits on the court today only because he assisted in an act of Republican partisanship that was the direct precursor to Trump's own attempts to nullify citizens' votes for no reason other than capturing power that the citizens themselves would not give him.
Sure, whatever. It's absolutely dreadful for Roberts that issuing the most appalling ruling in a century resulted in public contempt. It's enough to make a person weary.
Perhaps he should try not doing that, then. And perhaps reporters can quit fluffing these obvious partisans with unwarranted speculation about how perhaps they might not really do the thing they've been signaling they're going to do every time the question is posed to them.
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