Elie Mystal: How John Roberts Went Full MAGA (The Nation)

[Dennis Donovan]

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Elie Mystal
Yeah. I read Jodi Kantor's (NYT) piece about John Roberts. And while the report wasn't surprising to me, it highlights something people need to understand: Roberts is in the tank for Trump and will help him in this election if he can.

My latest in The Nation:

How John Roberts Went Full MAGA

A revealing article in The New York Times details how the chief justice put his thumb on the scale for Trump to keep him on the ballot and out of jail.

Elie Mystal

Politics / September 17, 2024

It would appear that the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, John Roberts, has been fully captured by the cult of Donald Trump. An article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak in Sunday’s New York Times details how Roberts has been spending his time putting his heavy thumb on the scales to help Trump accomplish his legal and political goals. What it reveals is that Roberts wanted to make sure Trump could run in this election, wanted to make sure Trump escaped accountability for his many crimes, and wanted to grant Trump unprecedented immunity to commit additional crimes should he be returned to office.

Roberts accomplished this through three key cases, all of which the court heard last term, and all of which Kantor and Liptak break down with careful detail. Their reporting shows how Roberts abandoned a moderate, consensus-building approach in his decision to ignore valid 14th Amendment objections to Trump’s eligibility to run for office and instead opted for a more controversial and conservative ruling that sparked a fractured concurrence from the women on the Supreme Court. They explain how Roberts removed Samuel Alito (then mired in flag-related controversies) from the case that gave the January 6 rioters a way to get out of jail so he could write his own opinion giving aid and comfort to the terrorists (while also dodging questions about the court’s partisan rulings). And, most important, they reveal how Roberts decided to grant Trump unprecedented immunity before the case was even argued in front of his court.

In all these cases, the article shows that Roberts had a chance to build consensus decisions by striking a moderate tone with the liberal justices, but instead opted for hard-line MAGA positions that gave Trump everything he wanted. Hopefully, this puts a long-overdue end to the false media narrative that Roberts is a moderate institutionalist.

While the internal workings of the usually opaque Supreme Court can be fascinating from an inside-baseball perspective, nothing in the report is surprising to me. Roberts has always been a person who is trying to push the law as far to the right as Samuel Alito, without Alito’s bad press and caustic demeanor. The idea of Roberts as a moderating influence has always been false. He just wants the court to promote the partisan Republican agenda without seeming partisan. That doesn’t make him an institutionalist; it just makes him a better liar than the rest of his conservative friends.

/snip

[Girard442]

1. We need to vote against TSF by such overwhelming margins that even Roberts et al...

...are afraid to shiv the election.