John Roberts

John Roberts is the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. President George W. Bush nominated him on July 19, 2005, initially to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and then ultimately to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The Senate confirmed him on September 29, 2005.

The Washington Post reported that Federalist Society leader Leonard was “heavily involved” in Roberts’ nomination and confirmation: “Leo served as the leader of the campaigns supporting Supreme Court nominees John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. He and other members of an advocacy coalition spent about $15 million in donations from undisclosed donors on ads, telemarketing and the mobilization of ‘grass roots’ groups.” Leo also personally vouched for Roberts to other right-wing leaders: “When conservatives expressed doubts, Mr. Leo said, ‘I would say, ‘I know the man.’…” according to the New York Times. Leo told others he said “had known Judge Roberts for nearly 15 years in legal and Catholic circles and at the opera….” Leo has also been described as one of the “four horsemen” who advised Bush on judicial nominees. Before Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court, Leo helped instigate the “Judicial Confirmation Network” (later called the Judicial Crisis Network and the Concord Fund) after the 2004 election to support Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts.

Roberts has been called “one of the worst chief justices” in U.S. history. Under his leadership, the Court has been mired in controversy, due to both major ethics scandals involving the justices who form the faction he leads and the destruction of legal precedents that millions of Americans have relied on to safeguard their freedoms and health.

The firestorm of scandals that has engulfed the Supreme Court include lavish gifts of travel provided to Clarence Thomas by billionaire Harlan Crow. Other reporting detailed how Thomas had threatened to resign from the Court if he could not live the lifestyle he desired, and also that Leo had secretly arranged for Thomas’ wife, Ginni, to be paid a six-figure sum through one of the groups tied to him, the Judicial Education Project, the 501(c)(3) to the 501(c)(4) called the Judicial Crisis Network. In 2020, Ginni Thomas also actively urged White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to subvert the 2020 election results, and she even wrote to Wisconsin and Arizona state legislators to urge them to choose electors to vote for Trump contrary to the popular vote. Justice Thomas has failed to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6 insurrection, including the case where Roberts granted Trump unprecedented immunity.

Justice Samuel Alito has also accepted gifts of luxury vacations and been embroiled in allegations that he let outsiders know the result of the Hobby Lobby case before it was announced, which was part of an influence campaign where right-wing operatives used access gained through donations to the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society to ingratiate themselves with Alito and his wife, Martha Ann. Reporting also revealed that flags tied to January 6 had been flown over their residence in January and February 2021 and their vacation home in the summer of 2023. Another investigation captured Alito saying one side is going to win in the fight between the right and the left. His wife was also caught on tape saying how much she despised the rainbow flag representing gay rights and how in response she yearned to fly a flag emblazoned with flames that said “Shame” in Italian (“Vergona”). Like Thomas, Justice Alito has failed to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6 insurrection, including the case where Roberts limited the grounds for charging rioters involved in the insurrection, which had initially been assigned to Alito but which was transferred to Roberts after the flag stories broke.

Investigative reporters have also detailed how John Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, earned over $10 million dollars in commissions recruiting for major law firms, many of which have cases before the Supreme Court. The chief justice did not recuse from any cases due to his wife’s work. He also reported his wife’s compensation as salary, rather than commission, in financial disclosures, and did not disclose who his wife’s clients were. Attorney Kendal Price, a former colleague of Jane Roberts, submitted a complaint to Congress arguing that the massive commission payments were largely due to her husband’s role on the Court. Price also argued that justices should disclose more information when there is a potential conflict of interest. “I do believe that litigants in U.S. courts, and especially the Supreme Court, deserve to know if their judges’ households are receiving six-figure payments from the law firms,” she wrote.

The public’s perception of the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court has sunk to historic lows under Roberts, but he has still failed to deliver a binding code of ethics or enforceable standards for recusal and has refused to testify and speak with the Senate about Supreme Court ethics.

While Roberts has sought to position himself as a moderating voice on the Supreme Court, the reality is that he failed to protect the integrity of the Court and has used the power of the Court to limit the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, to restrict access to abortion, and limit the government’s ability to regulate corporations, and more.

Recent Rulings

Inventing Presidential Immunity from Criminal Prosecution and Effectively Pardoning Trump

From the bench, Roberts has signed onto numerous rulings protecting Trump, notably writing the opinion in a 6-3 ruling that in effect provides immunity to Donald Trump for crimes he committed as President that could be construed as official acts of the executive of the United States. While this edict in theory allows Trump to be prosecuted for activities not cloaked as “official acts,” it bars the use of any evidence of his words or deeds related to official acts. It ignores U.S. law since our nation’s founding that no person is above the law, including the president. It also ignores the language of the Constitution, which grants no such immunity and specifies that any official can be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and the Constitution’s oath of office, which requires that a President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Prospectively, Roberts’s reckless ruling gives license to a future president to use the power of chief executive and commander-in-chief, including the use of emergency declarations, to dramatically alter the law and the stabilizing norms central to American democracy, our economy, and our way of life without fear of criminal prosecution.

Roberts also wrote the majority opinion in Fischer v. U.S., a case about whether felony charges for obstructing an official proceeding, or attempt to do so were appropriate for January 6th insurrectionists. Former Pennsylvania police officer Joseph Fischer was at the capitol on January 6, 2021 and, according to prosecutors he was actively fighting Capitol police. He reportedly said in text messages that he wanted to go “to war” and “[t]ake democratic congress to the gallows… [they] [c]an’t vote if they can’t breathe.”

As described in Balls and Strikes:

“Fortunately, the insurrection… did not result in the overthrow of the federal government. In the years since, almost 1,500 people have been arrested for offenses in connection with January 6. Around 350 of them have been charged with violating Section 1512(c)(2), a provision of federal law that makes it a crime to ‘otherwise obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding,’ or to attempt to do so. The consequences of that charge are steep—up to 20 years in prison—but luckily for the January 6 defendants who face it, they have a fairy godmother in Chief Justice John Roberts… In Fischer v. United States, he waved a magic wand to rewrite the statute’s text in a way that, should Donald Trump lose another presidential election and again attempt to do a coup, will make it much harder to hold future insurrectionists accountable… This is becoming one of the Roberts Court’s favorite ploys: When they don’t like how the executive branch is enforcing a law passed by Congress, they fault Congress for passing a law that was, in the Court’s view, insufficiently specific. Reserving this power to itself puts the Court in the enviable position of being able to throw their ideological allies a bone whenever they feel like it. Today, that means a few insurrectionists may have their sentences reduced or their convictions overturned. Tomorrow it’ll mean, well, whatever the Supreme Court wants.”

Roberts’ opinion has been described by legal experts as a confusing and not intuitive reading of the law in question. In dissent, Amy Coney Barrett was joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. She criticized the majority opinion as reading the statute too narrowly, “The Court does not dispute that Congress’s joint session qualifies as an ‘official proceeding’; that rioters delayed the proceeding; or even that Fischer’s alleged conduct (which includes trespassing and a physical confrontation with law enforcement) was part of a successful effort to forcibly halt the certification of the election results. Given these premises, the case that Fischer can be tried for ‘obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding’ seems open and shut. So why does the Court hold otherwise? Because it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said… statutes often reach beyond the ‘principal evil’ that animated them.”

Related case: Trump v. Anderson (edict restoring Trump to the Colorado ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists holding office.)

Limiting Voting Rights

In 2013, Roberts authored the majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down crucial enforcement mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act (VRA). According to the Brennan Center:

“The Voting Rights Act inaugurated a new era of democracy in the United States. Nearly a century after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, Congress finally put teeth into its promise that no citizen could be denied the right to vote based on race. The VRA has been among the most successful pieces of federal legislation in the history of the country. To take just one example, in the twenty years following the law’s passage, the disparity in registration rates between white and black registration rates dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to eight just a decade later… The decision in Shelby County opened the floodgates to laws restricting voting throughout the United States. The effects were immediate. Within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo ID law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo ID laws that had previously been barred because of federal preclearance.”

Roberts declared these major mechanisms of the VRA no longer necessary, despite a raft of new voting restrictions passed in states that disparately impacted black voters.

In dissent, Ruth Bader Ginsberg blasted Roberts’ opinion gutting the VRA, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Since the decision, states previously subject to preclearance have passed a wave of restricting voting laws.

Similarly, in 2019, Roberts authored a 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause declaring that federal courts do not have authority to strike down unfair political maps due to partisan gerrymandering. He asserted that “[e]xcessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust. But the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’… does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary. We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent was extremely critical of Roberts’ opinion: “For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task 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 rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people… Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”

In 2010, Roberts joined a 5-4 majority in the notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling in which the Court barred Congress from regulating groups raising and spending money for “independent” spending to influence an election. It struck down key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act designed to limit the corrosive and distorting influence of dark money. The majority’s ruling effectively “barred Congress—and with it the American voting public—from limiting dark money in our elections. It did so by effectively altering the meaning of our First Amendment to give new rights to billionaires. Justice John Paul Stevens and the three justices appointed by Democrats strongly objected… The only congressional remedy available, according to Kennedy, was disclosure, but he erroneously assumed the funders of this spending by ‘outside’ groups would be revealed to the public. They were not and are not still.”

Weakening Government Expertise to Protect Public Health by Regulating Corporations

Roberts also wrote the majority in a series of cases limiting the power of federal agencies and the experts and scientists within those agencies responsible for protecting consumers, workers, and even corporations, with regulations that keep products, food, our climate, medicines, and more safe and viable. In Relentless and Loper Bright, Roberts sided with litigation groups fueled with millions of dollars from Charles Koch’s fortune who sought to overturn the Chevron precedent. Although on the surface the case was about regulation of overfishing that threatens marine stocks, this ruling will allow special interests to challenge regulations promulgated to protect public health, our environment, and our bodily autonomy. Many such interests will likely use “judge-shopping” to find Trump appointees willing to substitute their views for the expertise of civil servants in federal agencies and issue orders suspending rules.

Roberts also wrote the majority in West Virginia v. EPA, a 2022 case centered around the Clean Power Plan, which severely limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. “More broadly, the court was asked to address whether Congress must ‘speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions.’ That theory is often referred to as the ‘major questions doctrine,’ and it played a key role in Thursday’s decision,” as reported by the New York Times.

Roberts used the phrase “major questions doctrine” for the first time in his opinion, writing that it “took hold because it refers to an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”

Ian Millhiser for Vox blasted the absurdity of the court’s major questions doctrine used to justify what in effect was judicial power grab which he noted:

“allows the Court to effectively veto any action by a federal agency that five justices deem to be too economically significant or too politically controversial. This major questions doctrine, at least as it is understood by the Court’s current majority, emerged almost from thin air in the past several years. And it has been wielded almost exclusively by Republican-appointed justices to invalidate policies created by a Democratic administration. This doctrine is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Nor is it mentioned in any federal statute. It appears to have been completely made up by justices who want to wield outsize control over federal policy. And the implications of this doctrine are breathtaking. In practice, the major questions doctrine makes the Supreme Court the final word on any policy question that Congress has delegated to an executive branch agency — effectively giving the unelected justices the power to override both elected branches of the federal government.”

While Roberts’ opinion only barely mentioned the effects of climate change, Elena Kagan’s dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, detailed the consequences of climate change in depth. Kagan criticized Roberts’ decision to even take the case, since the Biden administration had already announced plans to issue a new rule and wrote that the court had appointed itself the decision-maker over climate policy over Congress or the EPA: “The subject matter of the regulation here makes the Court’s intervention all the more troubling. Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. And let’s say the obvious: The stakes here are high. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening. Respectfully, I dissent.”