John Roberts Has Lost the Public. Does He Care? [View all]

[BWdem4life]

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK

You would be forgiven were you to find yourself suffering from some version of motion sickness when reading about Chief Justice John Roberts’ worldview at the start of this new Supreme Court term. The chief justice, or so the legend holds, was a moderate conservative until he became a moderate moderate, until he morphed into a MAGA warrior last term. He was a humble minimalist until he turned into a grasping maximalist. He started his reign as chief justice as a coalition forger and then changed into a coalition destroyer. And as we continue to scratch our heads over where he has come from and where he has gone, one final mystery continues to confound: What ever happened to the chief’s legendary capacity to read the room?

Joan Biskupic’s reported piece in CNN this week, about the chief justice’s very extremely bad summer, bears the slightly misleading title “John Roberts Remains Confounded by Donald Trump as Election Approaches.” But as the analysis itself makes clear, it’s not the former president who is confounding the chief. It’s the general public. Roberts, according to observers, “was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.” As a consequence, reports Biskupic, “Unlike most of the justices, he made no public speeches over the summer. Colleagues and friends who saw him said he looked especially weary, as if carrying greater weight on his shoulders.”

This echoes precisely the blockbuster New York Times reporting from last month from Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, who also pointed out that Roberts had convinced himself last term that he would be able to razzle-dazzle the nation with soaring constitutional rhetoric in his immunity opinion, in ways that would lower the temperature in the public fury at the high court post-Dobbs: “In his writings on the immunity case,” write Kantor and Liptak,

the chief justice seemed confident that his arguments would soar above politics, persuade the public, and stand the test of time. His opinion cited “enduring principles,” quoted Alexander Hamilton’s endorsement of a vigorous presidency, and asserted it would be a mistake to dwell too much on Mr. Trump’s actions. “In a case like this one, focusing on ‘transient results’ may have profound consequences for the separation of powers and for the future of our Republic,” he wrote. “Our perspective must be more farsighted.”

Of course we all know how that worked out. And so, reportedly, does Roberts (or at least he does now). As the Times piece wryly observed, “the public response to the decision, announced in July on the final day of the term, was nothing like what his lofty phrases seemed to anticipate.” Both the CNN and Times accounts would seem to suggest, then, that it is not that Roberts’ politics or ideology shifted last term, when he handed former President Donald Trump three consequential, broad victories, each of which appeared in an opinion that Roberts wrote himself. What seems to have fundamentally changed was Roberts’ capacity to anticipate that there would be a backlash.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/supreme-court-analysis-john-roberts-public-confidence-crash.html