All posts tagged "john roberts"

'Not too late': Chief Justice John Roberts told legacy can be saved — but it has to be now

An analyst warned Tuesday that it's now time for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to stand up to President Donald Trump.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, journalist Steven Greenhouse argued that Roberts has "spearheaded a rightwing judicial revolution that took a wrecking ball to many precedents, laws and institutions. Some have called him the worst chief justice since Roger Taney, who wrote the horrific Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that enslaved Black people couldn’t be citizens."

The high court — and Roberts specifically — have given Trump even more power, he wrote.

"The bottom line is that under John Roberts, the court has gone far to weaken the pillars of our democracy; it has given the super-rich and giant corporations huge sway over our elections, greatly weakened protections for minority voters, encouraged out-of-control gerrymandering, handed more and more power to the most authoritarian president in history and emboldened him to act lawlessly. In other words, the Roberts court has done much of what an authoritarian ruler would want," Greenhouse wrote.

Roberts' rulings have also justified "the naive conclusion that state lawmakers’ desire to adopt discriminatory voting rules had largely disappeared." The justice has attempted to gut the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to guard states and local municipalities from drawing maps or election rules based on racial discrimination.

"But with each passing year, it has become increasingly clear that Roberts will be remembered as the chief justice who helped wreck numerous institutions vital to our democracy – they include fair, non-gerrymandered elections, a sane campaign finance system, the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters, and the bedrock notion that presidents are not above the law," Greenhouse wrote.

Roberts could change that, the journalist pointed out, and he might have shown some skepticism of Trump over his tariffs, adding "it’s not too late for Roberts to begin to redeem his reputation and legacy. He showed some signs of doing this in early November in signaling that he thought Trump had violated the law in imposing his 'emergency' tariffs on dozens of countries without clear authorization from Congress. We can hope that the tariffs case will serve as a long-awaited, much-needed first step for Roberts and the conservative supermajority to develop a backbone and begin issuing a series of rulings that curb Trump’s unending power grab."

"If they don’t stand up to Trump’s lawlessness soon, we may truly lose our democracy," he wrote.

John Roberts' 'corrupt bargain' exposed in eye-popping new analysis

The Supreme Court’s John Roberts' ‘corrupt bargain’ reveals what led to President Donald Trump's "abusive reign," a new analysis found.

Roberts and the high court are in a "love triangle" with Republicans and billionaires, Mother Jones wrote Wednesday.

" Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts," according to Mother Jones.

"His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation," the outlet reports.

The conservative majority justices have paved the way for the president's "lawless second term."

“The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP," Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler told the outlet.

And the justices appear to be on Trump's side, allowing the courts to be used as a shadow docket while "the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law."

It's puzzled lower courts and added more questions to the high court's decisions.

"As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast," Mother Jones reports.

“It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” said Doerfler, who studies the judiciary's role in democracy.

With a legal attack on the Voting Rights Act in the current term, the court will also consider "the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule."

It's now a matter of whether the Roberts court will push to secure a permanent GOP court.

"Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires," Mother Jones reports. "His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not 'lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.' Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return."

Trump just 'laid bare' the 'absurdity' of John Roberts' catastrophic decision: analysis

President Donald Trump just "laid bare" the "absurdity" of Chief Justice John Roberts' catastrophic Supreme Court decision, according to new analysis published Wednesday.

A new Mother Jones report from reporter Pema Levy describes how Trump can make the decision to demand the Justice Department pay him $230 million of taxpayer money "because thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the executive branch could accurately be described by King Louis XIV—L’état, c’est Trump."

That "colossal cash transfer" Trump is requesting can happen due to the high court opinions from Roberts, "in which the court has shifted the fundamental structure of American government such that federal agencies, including the Justice Department, are mere extensions of the president’s will."

The reality is that Roberts set the groundwork for Trump's latest "shakedown."

"The absurdity of Roberts’ decision was laid bare Tuesday: The president gets to pay himself hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, because he controls all executive branch personnel and all of their decisions, and there’s probably nothing anyone can do about it," Levy writes. "It sure doesn’t feel like our democratic accountability has increased. Of course, Congress could and should pass a law prohibiting such payments, and dare the Supreme Court to strike it down—but this Congress is unlikely to do even that bare minimum in response."

Trump wants to be compensated after the investigations over Russia's involvement and interference in the 2016 election, and Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents that he took after leaving the White House the first time.

"Now that he’s back in the White House, Trump plans to make the government pay for its appropriate use of its ability to investigate and prosecute to safeguard our democracy. And he grasps the fact that he has the absolute power to do that," Levy writes.

He even admitted it.

“With the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes the decision,” Trump said Tuesday in the Oval Office, following questions about the payments he requested.

“That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” Trump said.

Roberts has claimed to be increasing democratic accountability in his opinions.

"But at this point, we can all see the mess he’s created. A man who takes from the voters to line his pockets is not feeling all that accountable to anyone," Levy writes.

This man wants to steal your vote — and cement GOP minority control

America is 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 Donald 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 districts down the middle. Now Vice President 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 percent of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9 percent 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 (the chief 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 Carolina 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 have been 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 answer 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 in Rucho — joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer —Justice Eleanor Kagan wrote:

"For the first time ever, this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because [Roberts] 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 New York Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33 percent of voters believe that America’s political system can still address the nation’s problems, while 64 percent 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 20 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 Nov. 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 Roberts’ 20-year 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, last 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 Nov. 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.

'Fully MAGA now': Latest case has experts finally writing off 'arrogant' Supreme Court

When law professor Seth Chandler asked artificial intelligence to predict how the Supreme Court would rule in Trump v. CASA this summer, he won a $1 bet with a colleague. The AI-generated draft opinion proved “exactly right” about the 6-3 conservative majority ruling that limited universal injunctions in response to President Donald Trump's executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.

That might not seem too surprising — the court to which Trump appointed three justices has generally proved favorable to the president’s draconian policies, after all. Nonetheless, when the court heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Chandler, who specializes in constitutional law and computer science at the University of Houston, turned to AI again.

He asked Google Gemini to draft an opinion for the redistricting case. Once again, the AI assistant predicted a 6-3 ruling, the conservatives sticking together.

The 20-page fake draft opinion anticipates the Court will affirm a district court’s ruling that a Louisiana congressional map redrawn in 2024 to create a second Black-majority district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The map was redrawn because a federal court determined in 2022 that a new congressional map based on the 2020 census was likely in violation of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination against voters.

The 2020 map only had one of six Louisiana districts representing a majority of Black voters, despite one-third of the state’s population being Black.

In other words, the plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais claims that drawing maps to combat racism and ensure Black representation is itself a racist act.

The actual Supreme Court opinion might not come for months, but based on oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, experts predict further weakening of the Voting Rights Act.

“I'm not sure they'll say the whole thing's unconstitutional, but they will render it a less powerful force,” Chandler said.

“If I were the NAACP, I would not be happy with the way that argument went.”

‘Fist on the scale’

Chief Justice John Roberts “launched his legal career in attacking Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act Congress,” said Lisa Graves, chief counsel for nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2005, who also predicted a weakening of the landmark civil rights law.

Graves said it was “extraordinary to see … the Roberts Court putting its fist on the scale of justice in this way and also taking up this assault on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as Donald Trump, for months now, has been demanding that state legislatures rig their maps to protect him from having a Democratic majority in Congress that could begin to hold him accountable for his transgressions of the Constitution.”

Lisa Graves (provided photo)

In her new book, “Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights,” Graves details how Roberts spent “hundreds of hours trying to block” Section 2 while working for the Reagan administration.

Graves writes that Roberts was intensely questioned about his writings on the Voting Rights Act during his 2005 confirmation hearing. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said he was “deeply troubled” by Roberts’ “mean-spirited view” of Section 2.

Now, through Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts and his court are finally “poised to constrict the ability of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to limit disparate racial impact,” Graves writes.

She told Raw Story: “It does feel like the zeitgeist has caught up because more and more people are going ‘Whoa,’ so I guess it is an ‘I told you so,’ regretfully.”

‘Supremely arrogant’

Louisiana v. Callais stands to be highly influential, as states engage in off-cycle redistricting efforts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Typically, redistricting happens once a decade.

Trump told Texas Republicans to redraw congressional maps this summer, in an attempt to give Republicans five more House seats and solidify control. He’s since encouraged other red states such as Missouri, North Carolina and Indiana to gerrymander to boost the GOP.

If the Supreme Court does limit Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it will most likely “give the green light to yet further partisan gerrymandering, which in many cases will hurt minorities,” Chandler said.

Seth Chandler (Photo courtesy of the University of Houston Law Center)

With Roberts leading the way, Graves said the court was “determined to mow down those limitations on Donald Trump” as seen in Trump v. United States, the 2024 case that granted him "unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution.”

“I think this court is fully a MAGA court now,” Graves said.

“This Roberts court is supremely arrogant in its determination to roll back the clock on not just recent 21st-century precedents, but to roll back the clock to before the New Deal, to the Robber Baron era.”

Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said partisanship was “undeniable” in the judicial branch, despite a traditional expectation of impartiality.

“It's sort of the most political branch in the sense that the only way you can be on the courts is if you're appointed by an elected official, and the only way you're confirmed is if the rest of the elected officials at the federal level say, ‘Yeah, you can play here,” Cormack said.

“It's kind of a nice fiction that we tell ourselves to be like they're not partisan, but we do know that judges have political opinions. Someone put them in office, and someone voted for them, and someone voted against them.”

‘Opportunity to change’

Passed under Lyndon B. Johnson in the civil rights era, the Voting Rights Act is “one of the most important pieces of legislation that was ever written and enacted,” Graves said.

Weakening the law “would be a disaster for America,” she added.

“It would also pave the way for white-dominated, Republican-controlled legislatures in the South to further dilute Black votes in America in ways that would aid Trump's quest to secure an illegitimate majority in the House.”

Cormack said the court was considering the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais in “a very different way than how we've ever seen it in the past.”

She argued that the ruling could give an opportunity to “see things differently.”

“We know that Louisiana has a history of problematic discrimination — and that's not really controversial to say in the sense that they had poll taxes and literacy tests and white primaries and grandfather clauses until the very last time that they could, which was in 1965 — but we can't make it impossible for a state to outrun this sort of history,” Cormack said.

“We have to give states the opportunity to change … it's not fair to always hold the Confederate South to ‘They're always going to be problematic.’”

Lindsey Cormack (provided photo)

But Cormack acknowledged a ruling affirming the district court’s decision in the case “probably means that it's going to be very hard to bring a racially motivated claim” in the future.

Congress could pass new legislation reaffirming racial discrimination protections in the Voting Rights Act, Cormack said, but that’s unlikely given GOP control.

“It seems like the tolerance for … race-based anything is going by the wayside, at least by the majority party that controls the House and Senate right now, so it'll be really hard to see anything that happens in the next year to sort of change this.

“You get a different Congress, you maybe get a different outcome, but we're a ways off from that.”

Justices 'scared out of their minds' as game of 'chicken' looms with Trump: journalist

The U.S. Supreme Court has critics pointing to how the high court has "utterly failed" and presented "disastrous consequences" for Americans with its right-wing supermajority handing President Donald Trump a series of wins and "acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness."

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, journalist Steven Greenhouse outlines how the last 24 decisions from the SCOTUS emergency docket have favored Trump and his policies, which have often been granted without the high court giving any reasons.

"With the court’s new term beginning on Monday, many Americans are dismayed that the conservative justices have been so submissive to Trump, the most authoritarian-minded president in US history. Notwithstanding the US’s celebrated system of checks and balances, the justices have utterly failed to provide the checks on Trump that many legal scholars had expected," Greenhouse writes.

The high court has ceded to Trump and allowed him to roll out cuts to the Department of Education, remove temporary protected status for thousands of immigrants, and fire Federal Trade Commission and National Labor Relations Board members. It also let him stop $4 billion in foreign aid, lay off thousands of federal workers (some who had contractual protections) and deport people to countries where they have never lived.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in particular, has been called out by legal experts.

“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig said. Luttig is a highly conservative former federal appellate judge.

“The Supreme Court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said, explaining that the court is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness.”

Steven Levitsky, co-author of "How Democracies Die" and a political science professor at Harvard, says it's bewildering. It could also be a sign of these majority justices embracing the unitary executive theory.

“If they really believed that Trump was a threat to democracy, they wouldn’t be giving him so much power,” Levitsky said.

He argues that the justices are “scared out of their minds that they will have to play chicken with Trump,” Levitsky said. “The worst thing for them is if the government ignores them and they don’t have any authority. They’re just terrified that Trump will trample on them and undermine their authority. Trump is not someone you want to play chicken with. They’re terrified of a big, high-profile fight with Trump.”

Chief Justice John Roberts faces mounting criticism over 'emboldened Trump'

Chief Justice John Roberts' legacy is facing major questions as the U.S. Supreme Court returns from summer recess Monday amid mounting criticism that he's "emboldened Trump."

Trump is now eight months into his second presidency, and Roberts, who joined the high court 20 years ago, will now have to decide if it's time to push back on President Donald Trump's aggressive executive actions, according to analysis from Politico's Josh Gerstein.

"But critics say the court he oversees is doing little to rein in a president targeting political opponents for criminal prosecution, eliminating hundreds of thousands of federal workers without congressional input, and using funding halts to intimidate the country’s top universities. What’s more, many legal experts say, Roberts has actually emboldened Trump," Gerstein writes.

Trump so far has been "ecstatic" about his recent SCOTUS successes, many of which have been via "shadow docket." It's also put Roberts' "diminished" power in further doubt.

“The Supreme Court and the chief justice have given Americans zero reason to believe that they will slow this president in any way whatsoever,” said former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointee. “The Supreme Court has acquiesced in — if not given its imprimatur to — the president’s lawlessness.”

Roberts' critics and allies say that his July 2024 ruling on presidential immunity is what gave Trump this confidence and sense that he's "legally untouchable." In that decision, which began with the federal prosecution of Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, the court's majority opinion said that presidents, even after leaving office, have broad immunity from criminal prosecution based on their official acts. It was written by Roberts, and could have been in an effort to protect former President Joe Biden, whom Trump alleged he would be launching a prosecution against.

But in whatever direction Roberts and the high court were expecting the future to unfold, the move has now had further ramifications.

“I’m immune from all of the stuff that they charged me with,” Trump said after the decision.

One judge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Politico that Trump might think this is in perpetuity.

“I don’t think he … meant [it] to be for all time,” the judge said. “I think a lot of people think that was for all time, and I don’t think this was ever intended to be that way.”

Roberts did issue a rare statement in March after Trump called for impeaching judges who disagreed with him.

“Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said.

And in the weeks leading up to Trump's inauguration, Roberts also issued a warning about "dangerous' talk of defying court orders.

“Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” the chief justice wrote.

'Drunk with power': Author tells how Chief Justice John Roberts 'corrupted' Supreme Court

Twenty years ago this week, John Roberts was sworn in as chief justice of the Supreme Court, at 50 years old.

On that day, Lisa Graves “wept.” As chief counsel for nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2005, she anticipated Roberts’ commitment to “advancing a right-wing political agenda through the judiciary,” she writes in her new book: "Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights."

With President George W. Bush having two Supreme Court vacancies to fill, Roberts was considered a “bankable vote for the Right’s political agenda” and was supported by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the activist and fundraising impresario now widely considered the architect of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, Graves said.

“The Roberts Court I feared would be terribly destructive of Americans' rights, and it's been even more destructive than I feared,” Graves told Raw Story.

From rulings in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ushered in an era of unfettered dark money influence on elections, to Trump v. United States, which granted President Donald Trump “unprecedented immunity … to act as though he is above the law,” Graves argues Roberts facilitated the politicized state of a court that’s supposed to be impartial, but is now packed with Republican “partisan loyalists.”

“Roberts had conveyed this image that he was going to be a fair umpire as part of his nomination, but he has not been a fair umpire,” said Graves, now executive director of public policy watchdog group True North Research.

"He has put his weight — his fist — on the scale of justice, in favor of Donald Trump.”

‘Arrangement was illegal’

"Without Precedent" reveals how Roberts “sidestepped the ethics code” of the Court before he sat on it, by not recusing himself from a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, while interviewing for “the biggest” promotion to the Supreme Court.

The appeals panel overturned a district court, ruling in favor of the Bush administration by determining that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, held at Guantánamo Bay.

Roberts interviewed with Bush the same day the appeals court issued its order. Four days later, Bush announced Roberts’ nomination.

“Three prominent legal ethics professors later concluded that this arrangement was illegal under federal law,” Graves writes.

Lisa Graves. (provided image)

Roberts would recuse himself when the case reached the Supreme Court, which determined that the Bush administration did not have the authority to establish war crimes tribunals, and special military commissions were illegal under the Geneva Conventions and military law.

“His ambition for power I think was key to him deciding to secretly interview with a party to a case before him and not recuse himself,” Graves told Raw Story.

“Had he recused himself, which would have been the right thing to do, he might not have been chosen to be the chief justice or to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and had he ruled against the Bush administration, he might not have been chosen for that position.

“In fact, I think it's fair to say in either scenario, he would not have been chosen.”

‘Corrupted’

Ethical concerns have plagued the Supreme Court in recent years, including revelations that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accepted undisclosed luxury trips and gifts from billionaires, while their wives engaged in political actions related to the attempted overturning of Trump's loss in the 2020 election.

Roberts failed to stand up to Thomas and Alito’s “corruption and bias” and protect the integrity of the Court, Graves writes, by not agreeing to “commonsense and enforceable ethics rules.”

“In my view, the compelling explanation for why the self-described institutionalist facilitated Thomas and Alito’s unethical participation is that Roberts needed their votes to accomplish his agenda of aggrandizing presidential power to try to save Trump — as no one on the Court had dared to do for Richard Nixon — and to expand the power of the Court to have the final say over almost every issue,” Graves writes.

“That’s because Roberts, too, has been corrupted. As the saying goes, ‘A fish rots from the head down.’”

‘Reactionary docket’

The Supreme Court’s docket is “almost entirely discretionary,” and the Roberts-led Supreme Court has created a “reactionary,” case-load, Graves writes.

“The pattern we are seeing of the Roberts Court inserting itself into so many controversies reveals how the Court’s Republican appointees do not want American law — and culture — to remain as is,” Graves writes.

Without Precedent (provided image).

Last week, Thomas made a rare public appearance at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., to say the Court should take a more critical look at settled precedent.

That’s “unsurprising,” Graves said, given Thomas and his Republican-appointed peers’ voting records in cases such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which overturned the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.

During his confirmation hearing, Roberts was “very clever” in setting the stage for his Court’s pattern of overturning precedents by assuring senators he understood the principle of respecting precedent but discussing leaving room for a decision to be reversed, Graves said.

“I would say Roberts Court is out of control, or maybe drunk with power, because it is arrogantly overturning precedent after precedent in order to allow Trump to behave as no other president has,” Graves told Raw Story.

‘Judicial junta’

The Supreme Court’s new term starts Monday. It is set to hear a slate of cases related to Trump’s policies, from tariffs to transgender rights.

One case set to be heard on Oct. 15 is the Louisiana redistricting case, Callais v. Landry, where Roberts is “poised to constrict” Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which he fought against as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.

Graves reveals how at Roberts’ Supreme Court nomination hearing, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) was “deeply troubled” by Roberts’ “mean-spirited view,” of Section 2, which allows voters to seek judicial relief in response to a state or local government denying or limiting their right to vote based on race or color.

“Given the the performance of John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, I don't think any legal precedents are safe from this judicial junta,” Graves said.

But while Graves writes that decisions from the Roberts Court have assaulted workers’ rights, environmental protections, access to healthcare and voting rights, to name a few, she doesn’t want readers to come away “hopeless.”

Rather she hopes readers feel “a moral imperative for us to join together to reform the United States Supreme Court and restore and expand our rights.”

“I hope that they have a greater understanding of how we got into this mess, and the role that John Roberts has played in dismantling our rights and advancing this right-wing billionaire-backed agenda,” Graves said.

“ I hope that they will engage in the vital effort to reform the court and repair the damage that John Roberts and his fellow right-wing appointees have done on the Court.”

Without Precedent is out now.

Trump's racist Supreme Court has committed its worst outrage yet

Jason Brian Gavidia, a Trump supporter and U.S. citizen, has described how federal agents treated him during an immigration stop in June.

Gavidia runs an autobody shop in an eastern suburb of LA. One afternoon, a white unmarked van drove by, then did a sudden U-turn. Masked Border Patrol agents jumped out from all doors, carrying handguns and military style rifles.

Two agents approached Gavidia, pushed him up against a metal fence, and twisted his arm backward as they asked an odd question: What hospital was he born in?

Gavidia happened to be born in a neighborhood hospital, close by, so they were satisfied. But his friend and co-worker Javier Ramirez wasn’t so lucky.

Even though Ramirez, a U.S. citizen and father of four, approached the officers with his hands up to show he was no threat, two agents tackled him to the ground. They shoved him facedown, one agent kneeling on his back as he struggled.

Ramirez spent several days in detention. Still traumatized months later, he habitually looks over his shoulder in fear.

Luckily for both men, their ordeal was caught on video. Other recordings of incidents with worse outcomes have gone viral. They show federal immigration officers’ aggression and violence increasing in pursuit of Trump’s daily “detention quotas” to fill for-profit detention centers.

Before Trump

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Under clear 4th A precedent, reasonable suspicion is required before any person — U.S. citizen or not, documented or not — can be stopped by law enforcement. Under Terry v. Ohio, settled law since 1962, officers must have specific, articulable facts suggesting that someone is involved in or is about to be involved in criminal activity.

Skin color, a foreign accent, or a racist officer’s hunch were not enough.

The 14th Amendment prohibits the government from denying any person “equal protection of the laws,” meaning the government needs a valid reason before they can treat people differently.

Different conduct was always a valid reason. Different skin color was not.

Until now, both amendments forbade the government from using race as the motivating factor in any government action.

Masked federal agents could not jump out from behind a tree, or an unmarked van, to harass brown people. They couldn’t run up and demand to see their “papers.” They couldn’t throw people into an unmarked van for no reason other than not carrying the right documents in their pocket or purse.

Unequal protection

On July 11, following 4th and 14th Amendment law as it then existed, a District Court enjoined U. S. immigration officers from making investigative stops based on:

presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, and agricultural sites
the type of work one does
speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent
apparent race or ethnicity.

Two months later, six Trump-aligned Supreme Court justices lifted that injunction.

On September 8, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Republican majority scoffed at significant evidence of racial profiling by ICE agents, similar to what Gavidia and Ramirez endured, and allowed it to continue.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a smug concurring opinion, rejecting plaintiffs’ standing, then clarifying that “ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion,” but could be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors.”

He never defined, explored, or explained what “other salient factors” might be, but seemed to think working in a low-paying job was one of them.

Kavanaugh stressed the significance of the government’s immigration enforcement efforts like he was a talking head on Fox News, while ignoring harms to plaintiffs.

In “close cases,” he wrote, citing Hollingsworth v. Perry, “the Court considers the balance of harms and equities to the parties, including the public interest.”

Kavanaugh presumed irreparable injury to the government any time it is “enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes,” without examining how the government effectuates those statutes.

Kavanaugh did not discuss harms caused to children when their parents don’t come home for days, weeks, or months.

He did not discuss fear, marginalization, or the psychological harm of being tackled to the ground by masked federal agents.

He did not weigh the corrosive harms to a nation that no longer trusts but fears the federal government.

Kavanaugh focused only on people who are in the country illegally, ignoring harms to US citizens and their families, writing, “The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.”

He bypassed plaintiffs like Gavidia and Ramires, roughed up and wrongly detained for days, weeks and months even though they are citizens, writing blithely that although the fourth amendment still applied, excessive forces was not part of the underlying injunction.

What’s a brief attack among friends?

Kavanaugh indulged in the delusion that immigration stops are always “brief,” and that brief abuse at the hands of government is fine.

Demonstrating not only naivete but a complete disregard of the record before him, he wrote that when officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they “promptly let the individual go.”

He wrote multiple times that officers only stop people “briefly,” that “reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual,” and that “Individual(s) will be free to go after the brief encounter…”

The brevity of Gavidia’s encounter did not remove the harm, which may stay with him for the rest of his life. Ramirez’ encounter was not brief, but lasted for days. ICE has wrongly detained hundreds of US citizens for days, weeks, and months.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in the dissent, the Court has now “declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

Republicans on the high court did this after giving Donald Trump immunity for heinous crimes, as long as he’s carrying out ‘official’ duties, like murdering brown people in fishing boats.

The only silver lining is that when — not if — people start dying at ICE’s hands, ICE agents will not share Trump’s immunity. That must be why they wear masks.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

One man has done more to destroy our democracy than Donald Trump

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.

Destroying essential rules of democracy

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.

Shelby County v. Holder

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.

Rucho v. Common Cause

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.

McDonnell v. United States

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.

Trump v. United States

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.