Understanding John Roberts
An article in last week’s New Yorker titled “The Delusions of John Roberts” has the subheadline “The Chief Justice insists that his Supreme Court isn’t biased even as it keeps making dramatic leaps rightward.”
“It must be confounding to have Roberts’ job these days,” says longtime New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot. “In one sense, he’s been getting so much of what he has long believed in: the weakening of the administrative state, the enlargement of Presidential power, and the rollback of affirmative action and of voting-rights protections for minorities, which he thinks our society no longer needs. These are goals he’s sought since he worked in the Reagan White House.”
If you have, like me, been surprised that Roberts has turned out to have such a conservative agenda after saying at his confirmation hearings that it would be his job “to call balls and strikes,” we’re not alone.
Talbot writes: “A former clerk for another Justice told me that, when he was at the Court, he never really got Roberts’ ‘talk about balls and strikes.’ Although Roberts believed in decorum and was ‘always polite,’ he also ‘seemed pretty ideological — he has an agenda and knows how to move it forward.’”
The article is about 12,000 words; here are some key quotes:
— Rogers Smith, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, says: “Roberts is glad to rule against the Trump Administration when he can to help bolster the image of judicial impartiality. He will do it in cases where it does not threaten the efforts to restore what he thinks is a correct conservative understanding of the Constitution.”
— Roberts’ jurisprudence on race often reverts to a simplistic notion of color blindness, in which taking race into account — no matter the reason — is itself racial discrimination, Talbot says. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in 2006, dissenting from a majority opinion saying that part of a Texas redistricting plan had violated the Voting Rights Act.
— At Roberts’ confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, civil-rights hero John Lewis testified, “We cannot afford to elevate an individual to such a powerful lifetime position whose record demonstrates such a strong desire to reverse the hard-won civil-rights gains that so many of us sacrificed so much to achieve.”
— In a memo Roberts wrote in 1983 when he worked for the Reagan administration, he said: “The time is ripe to reconsider the Constitutional anomaly of independent agencies” and “bring them back within the executive branch” — even if “more timid souls” see this as too “provocative.”
And, of course, this past term, the court ruled 6-3 in an opinion written by Roberts that the president has the authority to remove members of independent agencies at will.
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