Chief Justice John Roberts warned a group of graduating laws students Monday that the rule of law is “endangered.”
Without naming any names, the conservative justice also said during an event with students at Georgetown University that recent attacks against Supreme Court justices have gone too far.
“The notion that rule of law governs is the basic proposition,” Roberts said, according to Politico. “We need to stop and reflect every now and then how rare that is, certainly rare throughout history, and rare in the world today.”
In response to a student’s question, he also said criticism of the Supreme Court is a good thing—“so long as it is not trashing the justices,” Bloomberg reported.
The comments came as Trump and his supporters have attacked federal judges—including conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—and ignored judicial rulings.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in April that the U.S. government must “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland dad mistakenly deported to a Salvadoran prison, and share the steps it was taking with the district court.
Instead of following the ruling, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared on Fox News and insisted Abrego Garcia’s wife and 5-year-old son—who are both U.S. citizens—were better off without him.
Later, she attacked the judges who have issued rulings upholding due process for migrants, calling them “deranged” and threatening to arrest them.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, meanwhile, has ranted that a cabal of “communist judges” were trying to “shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”
Those comments followed a script provided by Trump himself, who in March went after James Boasberg, the federal judge hearing a challenge to the president’s plan to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega prison.
After Boasberg temporarily halted the deportation flights, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Boasberg was a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.”
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote.
The post inspired a group of MAGA representatives to introduce articles of impeachment against Boasberg just hours later. That very same day, Roberts issued a rare statement condemning the calls for impeachment.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in statement later that same day. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Last week, the chief justice seemed to once again reference the judicial turmoil at a speaking event in New York. The courts are a “coequal branch of government,” he said, and said their job is to “check the excesses of Congress or of the executive.”
At Georgetown, however, the majority of his remarks seemed to focus less on the broader war on the judiciary and more on specific attacks against his colleague Coney Barrett. In recent months, the conservative justice has twice sided with the court’s three liberals to vote against key Trump administration policies.
Roberts and Coney Barrett both held in March that Elon Musk‘s nebulous cost-cutting initiative DOGE could not unilaterally freeze $2 billion in congressionally approved aid for work that had already been completed.
The decision left in place a lower court ruling unfreezing the aid, sending MAGA into meltdown mode. Right-wing influencers called Coney Barrett a “DEI hire,” a “disgrace,” and “evil,” forcing Trump to defend her as being “very smart.” (Roberts, conveniently, was spared the onslaught.)
In April, Coney Barrett again faced MAGA’s ire for not siding with Trump in the case before Boasberg. Voting 5-4, the Supreme Court lifted Boasberg’s temporary restraining order halting the deportations, but said the migrants were entitled to due process.
On Monday, Roberts told the audience, “The court has obviously made mistakes throughout its history, and those should be criticized. So long as it is in terms of the decision, really, and not ad hominem against the justices. I just think that doesn’t do any good.”
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