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.
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