The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term just days after the 20th anniversary of John Roberts being sworn in as chief justice. It is not a happy anniversary.
There is little doubt that the court’s right-wing majority will use the coming term to further dismantle constitutional checks and balances and grant more power to the increasingly dictatorial President Trump. The only real question is how aggressively the Roberts-Trump Court will pursue its drive to reverse more than a century of constitutional precedent and social progress.
As many commentators have noted, Roberts’s famously reassuring confirmation hearing claim that his role as a justice would be to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat” has proven to be an empty promise.
Roberts has presided over the dismantling of campaign finance laws and the weakening of bribery and anti-corruption laws. He has led the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and given a pass to even the most abusive and discriminatory partisan gerrymandering.
The Roberts Court has insisted that race cannot be used even indirectly in college admissions, but must be given a greenlight to racial profiling at the heart of violent ICE sweeps that violate the rights of citizens as well as non-citizen immigrants.
With three Trump justices supercharging the MAGA majority, the Roberts Court brushed aside 50 years of precedent and overturned Roe v. Wade.
And it looks like they’re preparing to overturn a 90-year-old precedent upholding independent agencies created by Congress to shelter their missions from partisan political pressure. Trump is turning those agencies into tools any abusive president can weaponize against opponents. So far, the court has backed him up.
Roberts has occasionally parted ways with the justices further to his right, most notably on upholding the Affordable Care Act. But those stand out because they are rare exceptions.
The impact of the Roberts Court has overwhelmingly been to undermine democracy, empower authoritarianism, strengthen the power of corporations and billionaires and weaken protections for American workers, consumers, communities, and the environment.
Repealing the New Deal and pulling the constitutional rug out from under social safety net programs and other efforts to promote freer and fairer society has long been a goal of the right-wing legal and political movements that brought us the court’s actively reactionary majority.
The masterminds behind the Project 2025 presidency schemed to move so fast and so hard that they would overwhelm political and legal opposition. Trump has adopted this steamroller strategy.
In the face of this onslaught, public interest legal advocates have done a great job challenging the administration’s lawbreaking. Lower court judges have frequently upheld their responsibility to protect Americans from a president who abuses his power.
But those judges have been repeatedly undermined by Roberts and his right-wing colleagues, who have gone out of their way to let Trump trample the rule of law.
The Roberts-Trump Court has abused its shadow docket — or emergency docket — to make decisions that will have a huge impact on Americans’ lives and our democracy without any public argument or even a public explanation of their thinking.
Thank goodness for truth-telling from dissenting justices, particularly Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in one dissent.
One of the most egregious ways in which the Roberts Court has expedited presidential lawlessness was the devastating decision to grant President Trump and future presidents virtually complete immunity from being held accountable for criminal wrongdoing as president.
The broad presidential immunity manufactured out of thin air by Roberts has encouraged Trump’s brazen corruption and lawbreaking. Unfortunately, the worst may be yet to come, considering Trump’s recent speech to high-ranking military leaders telling them to prepare to go to war in America’s cities against “the enemy within.”
The impact of Roberts’s 20-year tenure is a reminder that every presidential election matters not only to us but to our future.
Roberts is doing great damage to our country long after the president who appointed him left office. The same will surely be true of Trump’s justices, who will be carrying out their assault on a century’s worth of progress long after Trump is no longer occupying the White House.
We owe it to the generations of Americans who struggled to make that progress, and to all the people whose futures are at risk, to make sure that every American knows how much is at stake when they decide whether or how to cast their vote.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
