Chief Justice John Roberts has been exposed, wrote legal observers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern for Slate. He may pretend to be the deliberate, moderating force on the Supreme Court, but behind the scenes he has become as reactionary as the rest of the court's right wing.
This became clear after the court handed down its radical decision giving former President Donald Trump a presumption of immunity for "official acts" in office, reversing all lower judges who considered the matter, all while leaving unclear guidance about how exactly to define an official act, they wrote.
Their feature followed a New York Times expose on how the court arrived at its decision — while the liberals were trying to moderate the opinion, and far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch privately wanted to punt it until after the election, "It was Roberts who decided that Trump and Trumpism would prevail in all three insurrection cases and he did not, in this instance, follow in the wake of the court’s aggressive conservative maximalists,' the Slate report stated.
"He was the aggressive conservative maximalist. And he created majority opinions in his own image."
ALSO READ: Trump turned politics into a joke — and now he’s the punchline
This account, Lithwich and Stern wrote, paints a picture of Roberts as arrogant, uncompromising, and fanatically convinced the country would applaud his judgment in favor of Trump.
"He inveighed that the Supreme Court should take the case — which would hold up Trump’s criminal trial slated for the summer — but also previewed how the justices would reverse the lower-level ruling. 'I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently' from the appeals court, he warned. From that point onward, it appears he was committed to a sweeping decision for the former president — and never seemed to wonder if a massive victory for Trump might imperil American democracy."
The decision ultimately sparked outrage among legal observers. Special counsel Jack Smith, for his part, is moving ahead with a revised indictment of Trump that some observers fear could be cut down even more by Roberts down the line.
Meanwhile, Roberts went maximalist on the other cases affecting Trump, too, the Slate article claimed.
"All four women justices were prepared to unequivocally join a modest opinion that kept Trump on the Colorado ballot without gutting the constitutional bar on insurrectionists returning to office. The chief justice spurned them, siding instead with the four other conservative men who wished to write this clause out of the Constitution."
"The little scooplets are earthquakes, as is the fact that someone at the high court is not just talking to the press, but also leaking memos that reveal highly sensitive details of its decisionmaking process," Lithwick and Stern wrote.
"But the real story that emerges between the lines is that anyone who believed that John Roberts was a principled movement conservative but also a Never Trumper was wrong. Roberts moved mountains to allow Trump to evade accountability for attempting to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election."
