Twenty years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts took the oath of office and ushered in a new era for the Supreme Court. His 2005 confirmation vote marked the transition from the Rehnquist court—where a narrow majority of conservatives and moderates had largely maintained the status quo on abortion, affirmative action, and voting rights—into something much more reactionary.
At his swearing-in ceremony, the new chief justice spoke eloquently about the immense weight of the court’s duty to preserve the U.S. constitutional order. “What Daniel Webster termed ‘the miracle of our Constitution’ is not something that happens every generation,” Roberts said in his remarks. “But every generation in its turn must accept the responsibility of supporting and defending the Constitution, and bearing true faith and allegiance to it.”
“That is the oath that I just took,” he continued. “I will try to ensure, in the discharge of my responsibilities, that, with the help of my colleagues, I can pass on to my children’s generation a charter of self-government as strong and as vibrant as the one that Chief Justice Rehnquist passed on to us.”
The United States is less democratic, less self-governing, more dysfunctional, and more corrupt than it was 20 years ago, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s rulings.
By that standard, the Roberts court has failed. The United States is less democratic, less self-governing, more dysfunctional, and more corrupt than it was 20 years ago, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s rulings. Many of its most important decisions—on campaign finance, on voting rights, on gerrymandering, and on the separation of powers—have left us less able to resolve political questions and issues than any previous generation has been.
“Umpires don’t make the rules,” Roberts said, when describing his judicial approach at his 2005 confirmation hearings. “They apply them.” If Roberts is rarely depicted as a firebrand or a zealot, few would deny his unmistakable ideological tilt. And yet, Roberts is often portrayed as a moderating force. His Republican-appointed colleagues may be working to covertly advance an ideological project, but Roberts was different: an arch-institutionalist willing to cast aside his own leanings to preserve the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a hyper-partisan era.
If that was his goal, then he has failed miserably. Public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution has also collapsed. When Roberts was inaugurated, Gallup found in a September 2005 poll that 56 percent of Americans approved of the court’s job. In July this year, that number had dropped to 39 percent—the first sub-40 result in the survey’s history.
Some of that decline can be attributed to a shift in the court’s makeup: Roughly 10 percent of Democrats and around one-third of independents approve of the work of a Supreme Court that now boasts a conservative supermajority. But Roberts shares much of the blame himself. Over the course of two decades, he has overseen an effort that has steadily chipped away at many of the twentieth century’s pivotal decisions, made government less responsive and effective, and handed enormous power to corporations and the extremely rich.
How did we get here? Any survey of the Roberts court’s impact on American political life must begin with Citizens United v. FEC. The 2010 ruling overturned key portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which limited how corporations and unions could spend money on political campaigns during an election cycle. In doing so, the court limited earlier campaign finance rulings that had allowed Congress to constrain donors’ influence and thus prevent the appearance or reality of corruption.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 5–4 majority, argued that “favoritism and influence” were an inevitable feature of democratic governance. He concluded that Congress could only act in cases of quid pro quo corruption, limiting its ability to act more broadly to promote public confidence in the electoral system. Kennedy justified this outcome both on First Amendment grounds and on his own assumptions about the public.
When past Supreme Court rulings “identified a sufficiently important governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption, that interest was limited to quid pro quo corruption,” he wrote. “The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.”
The last 15 years have proved him wrong. Public sentiment remains largely hostile to the decision and its subsequent effects on campaign spending. Shortly after the decision came out, one survey found that eight in 10 Americans opposed the move. Between the 2008 election—the last federal election held before Citizens United—and the 2024 election, spending on presidential and congressional campaigns doubled to nearly $15 billion, even after adjusting for inflation.
In the 2024 election, for example, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk donated almost $300 million to bolster Donald Trump’s reelection bid. The Tesla CEO’s massive contributions flowed not to Trump’s campaign coffers, but to allied super PACs and other formally unaffiliated groups. Under the Supreme Court’s view of campaign finance, this is acceptable because those groups are technically independent of a candidate’s campaign and pose a lower risk of corruption.
By the end of the first week of his second term, Trump made it abundantly clear just how wrong it was. Soon after taking office, he created the Department of Government Efficiency and set Musk in charge of it with carte blanche to reshape the federal government to his whims. Musk used that power to fire thousands of federal civil servants, blocked congressionally appropriated funds from being sent to states and nonprofit groups, and dismantled congressionally mandated agencies. His abrupt scorched-earth closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, will likely kill millions of people in developing countries in the next decade—all with power Musk accrued via massive campaign donations that would have been impossible before Citizens United.
At the same time that it has expanded the influence of money in politics, the court has also substantially narrowed federal laws that criminalize corruption. In the 2016 case McDonnell v. United States, the justices unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor who had performed a variety of services—setting up meetings, making introductions, pressuring other officials—in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in luxury gifts and loans.
The average American would probably consider that to be bribery. The high court disagreed by ruling that none of the activities counted as an “official act,” and therefore they were protected by the First Amendment. “There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,” Roberts wrote for the court. “It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”
The court has also positioned itself as an implacable enemy of political reform in other spheres. The 2019 decision Rucho v. Common Cause—written by Roberts himself—allowed state GOP lawmakers to give themselves supermajorities even if a majority of voters cast their ballot for a Democratic candidate.
For Americans, the result is a less democratic and less stable society. Of the 435 House seats that were contested in the 2024 election, only about 30 of them were actually competitive races between Democratic and Republican candidates. Americans who lived in the other 400 or so districts effectively faced a preordained choice. Entrenched partisan gerrymandering also encourages more extreme candidates, by making party primaries—where compromise and moderation are often dissuaded in favor of ideological purity—the decisive factors in an election’s outcome.
Americans now enjoy fewer protections for their right to vote in 2025 than they did in 2005. The year after Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were sworn in, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for an additional 25 years. The renewed and amended act received overwhelming support in the House and unanimous approval in the Senate. President George W. Bush commemorated its passage at the National Convention for the NAACP and invited civil rights leaders to see him sign it at the White House, reflecting the nation’s post-1960s consensus on civil rights laws
In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, the Roberts court broke that consensus. Under the Voting Rights Act, certain states and counties could make changes to their voting laws only with approval from a Federal District Court in D.C. or the Justice Department. The court’s five conservative justices struck down the formula in the law, ending that practice but leaving open the possibility that Congress could enact a new one. Republicans have uniformly opposed any attempt to do so, a response that is unlikely to have surprised any of the conservatives on the court.
As the Supreme Court was making the nation less democratic, it was also working to make its government less responsive and effective. Since the early twentieth century, Congress has created and relied upon specialized agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to regulate complex aspects of the national economy. Americans who grew up or lived in the twentieth century saw those agencies vanquish widespread air and water pollution, unsafe foods and drugs, a wide range of deadly infectious diseases, abusive and fraudulent business practices, and so on.
For the Roberts court, however, those agencies represent a fundamental threat to the separation of powers. The court’s conservative majority has overturned precedents that required judges to defer to agencies’ interpretations in some cases and has struck down statutory protections that insulate some department heads from at-will dismissal. Congress’s intent in creating the agencies is sidelined in favor of stronger control by the executive branch and closer scrutiny from the conservative-led courts.
One of the Supreme Court’s most pernicious tools in recent years is the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court could overturn new regulations if it thought that Congress’s authorizing statute did not “speak clearly” enough to allow the agency to regulate a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Those terms are subjective enough to give the court a freewheeling veto over matters as wide-ranging as student debt forgiveness, regulating carbon emissions, and vaccine mandates.
In Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the cases on the president’s power to remove agency leaders, Roberts came close to rejecting the concept of three coequal branches of government by arguing that the legislative branch warranted special scrutiny. “The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that ‘differences of opinion’ and the ‘jarrings of parties’ would ‘promote deliberation and circumspection’ and ‘check excesses in the majority,’” Roberts wrote, quoting selectively from the Federalist Papers. “By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities,” he continued. “As Madison put it, while ‘the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be […] divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.’”
Roberts’s misconception, to put it mildly, comes from relying on what the framers said over what they actually did. The framers indeed created a presidency to address one of the principal defects of the Articles of Confederation. But they also created a much more powerful Congress under the Constitution than had existed under the Confederation. For the first time, the nation’s legislature could raise taxes, fund armies and navies, regulate commerce, and establish courts. It can even remove presidents and Supreme Court justices from office.
In addition to weakening Congress, the Roberts court has laid the groundwork for an authoritarian presidency. Its ruling in Trump v. United States last year, where the court created the doctrine of “presidential immunity” out of thin air, allows presidents to commit a wide range of crimes without fear of future prosecution. The 6–3 ruling concluded that presidents should have “presumptive immunity” for their official acts in general. For acts that fall within the presidency’s “core constitutional powers,” like issuing pardons or commanding the military, presidents now enjoy absolute immunity.
There is no constitutional basis whatsoever for that framework, or for the concept of “presidential immunity” in general. The Constitution itself only explicitly gives immunity to members of Congress in certain circumstances, such as travel to and from the Capitol and when participating in speeches and debates. The courts have also long recognized judicial immunity as an irreducible feature of the Anglo-American legal system. Presidential immunity, on the other hand, did not exist until Donald Trump asked for it and the Roberts court gave it to him.
It is hard to overstate the decision’s radicalism. While the forms of legislative and judicial immunity that exist in our system are narrow in scope, presidential immunity is not. Members of Congress and federal judges can still be prosecuted for taking bribes to perform an official act. Trump, on the other hand, could issue pardons in exchange for personal payments of $1 million and still fall within the immunity ruling’s bounds. The Roberts court’s ruling is not merely a shield against overzealous prosecutors; it is a blank check for corruption and abuse of power.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that, under the ruling’s own terms, a president could lawfully order SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rivals and still retain immunity. Roberts replied that his colleague was “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” Beyond that, he did not seriously dispute her interpretation.
The collective impact of the Roberts court’s ruling is far more disastrous than the sum of the individual parts. For almost 250 years, Americans defined themselves by their civic republicanism—their cultural and philosophical inclination toward self-government, their ability to address problems and issues through democratic means, their opposition to despotic or hereditary leadership, and their respect for the rule of law.
The Roberts court has not extinguished these traditions altogether, but it has made them much harder to maintain. It is harder to keep faith in the nation’s political system when anti-corruption laws go unenforced. It is harder to maintain the rule of law when the nation’s highest court says the president can commit crimes. Self-government is impossible when elected officials know their power comes from gerrymandered districts and wealthy donors instead of the people.
Americans are historically reluctant to meddle with the Supreme Court as an institution. Since the founding era, Americans’ basic respect for the courts has run deeply in our civic culture. Reformers have successfully pushed through constitutional amendments to reshape Congress, the presidency, and the federal-state balance of power over the last 250 years. And yet the high court has been basically untouched since it was last expanded in 1869. This sense of continuity is an added hurdle to reform. Americans are not only accustomed to the court; they find it difficult to imagine it changing—an understandable challenge, given it hasn’t in over 150 years. As a result, any effort to alter the court is depicted as a radical, un-American effort to rig the system on behalf of one party at the expense of the other. That is, more or less, what has happened without reform, however. The only way to restore a sense of balance and faith in the court—and to make it actually responsive to the needs of the citizenry—is reform.
Life tenure is often seen as the cornerstone of U.S. judicial independence. In recent decades, some drawbacks have emerged. The sole means by which Americans can currently influence the court’s ideological makeup is through indirect and gradual measures: Presidents nominate candidates to replace vacancies when they occur, and the Senate approves them after an exhaustive confirmation process.
Strategic retirements fray that already threadbare bond between the court and the American people. By choosing to retire only when certain presidents and parties are in power, the justices can ensure that their successor has a similar ideological tilt. The result is a quasi-hereditary institution, one where members actively work to ensure that the people’s views will not change the court’s ideological balance.
By usurping and second-guessing Congress’s judgment so often and so enthusiastically in a particular direction, the Roberts court no longer resembles a judicial body as much as it resembles the old House of Lords that used to dominate British politics. Our cousins across the Atlantic finally remedied the problem in 1911 by compelling the lords to accept strong limits on their own power—not through persuasion, but by threatening to pack the lords with as many new dukes and earls as would be necessary to break the aristocratic grip on democratic governance.
If Democrats retake the White House and both chambers of Congress at some point in the future, they should not make that same threat—they should simply do it. The Roberts court has spent the last 20 years dismantling liberal democracy as Americans have known it. Its rulings have paved the way for the first quasi-dictatorship in the republic’s history. Congress should add as many justices to the Supreme Court as it takes to produce a bench that believes in basic American values once more: self-government, civic virtue, and the rule of law.
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