This Is All John Roberts' Fault
Trump owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man.
Pema Levy and Ari Berman
Imagine: You are at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening?
Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy. But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way. In a matter of months, the court’s 6–3 GOP-aligned majority has permitted a long list of lawless actions, including firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse. But the court’s acquiescence to an antidemocratic America didn’t start in 2025. Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.
-snip-
Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/john-roberts-donald-trump-supreme-court/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I’ve read so many threads over the past several years that assert, with 100% certainty, that Meek Merrick Garland is the One and Only True Villain of this story…
And now you come along and tell me that no, it’s actually John Roberts and the corrupt MAGA majority on SCOTUS who are the ones to blame?
Well, that changes everything…
This member of the reality-based community thanks you for your rational perspective.
PS: court expansion, and killing the filibuster to do so, must be THE litmus test for every primary candidate running for congress or senate.
Without court expansion Dems, once back in power, will be blocked from repairing the damage of the Trump era and restoring Democracy.
I saw through the moderate bs.
He is not funny either. He is just a myopic bore:
https://www.courthousenews.com/supreme-court-revives-battle-over-frog-habitat-in-louisiana/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chief-justice-roberts-gets-vivid-075742786.html
The endangered dusky gopher frog is cool unlike Roberts:
They are fighting a losing battle at least wrt being on the right side of history - these invasive, anti-environment assholes:
https://saveamphibians.org/