The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to place Donald Trump beyond the reach of law looks worse with every passing week, according to a legal expert, and Chief Justice John Roberts may be remembered as the last person to hold his position.
The court's right-wing majority ruled in favor of the president, who was then cruising to the Republican presidential nomination last summer, in Trump v. United States, granting him broad immunity against the criminal charges he faced at the time for attempting to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election. Law professor Gene Nichol published a column for The State shaming the chief justice as a coward.
"The plan seems to be — if we grant the president everything he dreams of, maybe he’ll leave the high court unmolested," wrote Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina. "The republic may fall but we’ll still have the cool robes and life tenure. John Roberts is becoming the Neville Chamberlain of post-democratic government in America."
After granting the president the power to break the law, the court has allowed him to illegally dismantle federal agencies and claw back congressionally approved funding without even bothering to explain their legal reasoning.
"The court seems to have invalidated, after nearly a century of ready and repeated judicial embrace, the notion of independent federal agencies," Nichol wrote. "In a brief, unsigned order, the justices just blocked a federal district court ruling preventing Trump from firing, contrary to statutory mandate, three of the five members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The landmark 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. was cast aside. No limitations on presidential discretion are now to be tolerated — no matter how much sense it may make to remove certain types of administrative decision-making from the sway of politics."
"All power to Trump, regardless of the claims of text and history," Nichol added, bitterly. "You demand it, Mr. President, we deliver, even if on the down low. Just spare us your wrath. We don’t even mind if you violate our decrees. Just lie when you do it. Easy enough."
Roberts' surrender to Trump made the court all but irrelevant, according to Nichols.
"It’s reasonable to wonder whether the rule of law can survive this," the professor wrote. "As John Roberts works to become our worst modern chief justice, will he also effectively become our last?"