At a time when federal judges have faced threats, intimidation and calls for impeachment, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday used his annual report on the state of the judiciary to focus on history and the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday, with a nod to judicial independence.
The report landed at a fraught time for the Supreme Court as it confronts a series of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s expansion of presidential power. It followed months of attacks by President Trump and his allies on lower-court judges who have ruled against him.
But Chief Justice Roberts chose to address such matters only through oblique historical references. In a 13-page report, he traced the development of the nation’s two foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the role they envisioned for the judiciary.
Chief Justice Roberts, who is in his 20th year at the court and, as chief justice, formally oversees the entire federal judiciary, by tradition releases the report about the state of the nation’s courts on the last day of the year.
In some years, he has used the document to address current concerns, including last December, when he issued a prescient warning that judicial independence was under threat. “Violence, intimidation and defiance directed at judges because of their work undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” he wrote then, just weeks before Mr. Trump returned to office for his second term.
This year, Chief Justice Roberts hewed more closely to history, describing in the report how the founders sought to reverse a system in which the British king controlled the salaries of judges. The Constitution, he wrote, “corrected this flaw, granting life tenure and salary protections to safeguard the independence of federal judges and ensure their ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches.” The arrangement, he wrote, has “served the country well.”
That line echoed the chief justice’s public remarks in May in which he defended the independence of the judiciary and said the job of judges was not just to decide cases, but also to “check the excesses of Congress or the executive.”
With both houses of Congress controlled by Republicans, the federal courts have emerged as the primary check on the president’s boundary-pushing agenda.
Before the Supreme Court’s term ends next summer, the justices are expected to issue major rulings on Mr. Trump’s agenda, including determining the legality of the president’s sweeping tariffs, his efforts to fire independent government regulators and his bid to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship.
So far, the court’s conservative majority, with three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, has overwhelmingly sided with the administration in about two dozen brief emergency orders that have reversed lower-court rulings. The quick-turn decisions, largely issued with little or no explanation, have led to confusion and criticism, including from federal judges, whose decisions the justices review.
Dozens of federal judges told The New York Times earlier this year that the temporary orders were eroding public confidence in the judiciary and leading to extraordinary strains on the system. In interviews, one judge called the orders “mystical” and another compared the relationship between district courts and the Supreme Court to “a war zone.”
Chief Justice Roberts did not address those concerns in his report on Wednesday, alluding only to past periods of political division, and reassuringly offering that the nation’s founding documents had stood the test of time. He quoted President Calvin Coolidge, who on the occasion of the nation’s sesquicentennial in 1926 said that Americans could turn “for solace and consolation” to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
“True then; true now,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
Soon after taking office in January, the president faced a torrent of lawsuits seeking to block his agenda to fire thousands of government workers, slash federal spending and strip deportation protections for immigrants. Mr. Trump and his allies, in increasingly personal terms, vilified federal judges who ruled against him.
Judges have also faced threats and intimidation, including bomb threats and unsolicited pizza deliveries to their and their relatives’ homes.
The president repeatedly targeted the jurists on social media and called for the impeachment of James E. Boasberg, the chief judge for the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Boasberg had ordered the administration not to deport people suspected of being Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador without due process.
Mr. Trump’s demand in March that Judge Boasberg be impeached prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts, who said in a statement at the time that impeachment was “not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
The chief justice did not refer to the dust-up in his report on Wednesday but seemed to reinforce his previous message, recalling a moment from history when the House impeached Samuel Chase, a Supreme Court justice and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Justice Chase was acquitted by the Senate in 1805. He prevailed, Chief Justice Roberts explained, “because many senators concluded that disapproval of a judge’s decisions provided an invalid basis for removal from office.”
The outcome, the chief justice suggested, ensured that federal judges could act independently and issue rulings without congressional interference.
“Those of us in the third branch must continue to decide the cases before us according to our oath,” he wrote, “doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and performing all of our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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