The Roberts court has not covered itself in glory since it began.
Bad Roberts Court decisions before 2024 —
The Worst Decisions of the Roberts Court (A Partial List)
[The article lists 21. I picked my own worst of the worst list below.]
Crawford v. Marion County (2008): Paving the way for other voter suppression techniques, the court upheld an Indiana law requiring all in-person voters to present a photo ID issued either by the state or the federal government.
Citizens United v. FEC (2010): Overturning a century of campaign finance law and sparking the growth of super PACs, the court held that corporations, unions and other groups could spend unlimited money on elections.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013): The court gutted the “preclearance provisions” of the Voting Rights Act, which required advance federal approval of changes to election procedures in jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination.
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014): Exempting “closely held” corporations with religious objections from the Affordable Care Act’s provisions requiring employers to provide workers with health care insurance coverage of contraceptives.
Rucho v. Common Cause (2019): Dealing a crippling [blow] to democracy, the court held that issues of partisan gerrymandering are outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022): Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are overruled. www.truthdig.com/…
[ALSO, beyond bad rulings, see this article “Mourning Chief Justice Roberts's 20th Anniversary Part II: Top Ten Worst Moments of the Roberts Court”] www.dorfonlaw.org/...
SCOTUS says POTUS is above the law
July 2024- Trump v. United States
Supreme Court Grants Trump, Future Presidents a Blank Check to Break the Law
Before Trump, no one had even argued that presidents are absolutely immune from criminal liability after they leave office. Indeed, every president – including Trump himself – assumed the opposite. In his impeachment trial Trump’s lawyers argued against impeachment by conceding that an acquittal would not be the end of potential accountability, because he could be criminally prosecuted after he left office. That concession was in line with all prior presidents’ acceptance that the United States is a place where all citizens, including the president, are equal under the law.
No more. In Trump v. United States, the court’s Republican-appointed justices — including the three Trump appointees — announced a brand new constitutional immunity from criminal liability for presidents’ “official acts,” or anything a president may do using the powers of the office. The court’s decision ensures that future presidents — including Trump himself should he win reelection in November — will know that they can escape criminal accountability for blatantly criminal acts, no matter how corrupt. Even acts that strike at the heart of our democracy, like resisting the peaceful transition of power, could not be prosecuted...
As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. www.aclu.org/...
Only the Shadow Knows. Seriously.
The Shadow Docket proclaims an emergency, rules, but doesn’t explain.
Supreme Court Must Explain Why It Keeps Ruling in Trump’s Favor
The Supreme Court’s so-called shadow docket for emergency motions has played an outsized role in legal challenges against the new Trump administration. On issues ranging from dismantling the Department of Education to banning transgender people from serving in the military, federal trial judges from across the ideological spectrum have repeatedly blocked actions by the administration, only for the Supreme Court to halt those rulings with little or no explanation.
While the administration has only sought emergency review in some cases, its overall use of the shadow docket has skyrocketed. In the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action by the Court 19 times — the same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years, according to Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck. And the Court has sided with the administration nearly every time…
The Court’s recent shadow docket rulings highlight that there is in fact much to question about its unstated justifications. As several commentators have noted, it is hard to square many of the Court’s shadow docket decisions with the legal standards it is supposed to be applying. For example, the test for whether to halt a lower court injunction includes evaluating whether the applicant — in these cases, the Trump administration — risks irreparable harm if the injunction stays in place and whether the equities and public interest are on its side. In case after case, dissenting justices have argued that the Court has “botched” this analysis and made rulings that are “as incomprehensible as [they are] inexcusable,” halting lower court injunctions without any showing that the government is facing harm and with grave consequences, including in some cases in which the plaintiffs are at risk of torture or death. The majority’s response to these serious claims? Silence. www.brennancenter.org/...
Summertime and the ruling is easy (for the GOP SCOTUS)
The Roberts Court spent its summer vacation helping Donald Trump
Dismantling due process— The court kicked things off in early July, with an order backing the administration’s rapid effort to deport noncitizens to countries to which they have no ties…
Dismantling the Fourth Amendment— Backing the government’s roving immigration patrols, the majority freed officials from having to comply with a lower court order that had blocked them from overly relying on racial profiling to make stops in Los Angeles…
Dismantling agency independence— The court has also been helping Trump assert more control over independent federal agencies. Despite long-standing law and precedent protecting removals, the majority has been endorsing such firings on the shadow docket...
Dismantling foreign aid— Continuing the theme of consolidating Trump’s power, the majority recently let the administration withhold $4 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, in what the Democratic-appointed minority decried as the court’s latest blow to the separation of powers between the branches of government. www.msnbc.com/...
Is John Roberts the worst Chief Justice ever?
The Roberts Court Turns Twenty
Gallup’s polling data shows popular support for the Court at the lowest levels since they started measuring it. That’s more than just a meaningless statistic or an empty talking point, though; a Court without broad public support is a Court that won’t have the same capital to spend on ensuring that a dissatisfied President complies with rulings against him or enforces rulings to which he objects. Put another way, whatever the source of the Court’s mounting unpopularity, the result is to deprive the justices of a growing amount of the soft power on which their most important—and countermajoritarian—decisions have historically depended. And whatever the reasons for this development, it has happened on John Roberts’s watch.
And this leads me to the biggest question I have about John Roberts as we enter his third decade as chief justice and what could well be, by its end, one of the most consequential terms in the Supreme Court’s history: Is it that the Chief Justice doesn’t accept that the Court is losing credibility on a daily basis; that he thinks the Court doesn’t need that credibility in order to fulfill its intended role in our constitutional system; or that he doesn’t care? None of these answers seem consistent with the John Roberts I met in Miami in November 2006. But it’s hard to look at recent events and conclude anything other than that (at least) one of them has to be correct. www.stevevladeck.com/…
AND
Move over, Roger Taney and Melville Fuller.
American history has no shortage of legendarily bad chief justices and disgraceful decisions. But Chief Justice John Roberts has overseen the wholesale corruption and capture of the Supreme Court, and history should look back on his tenure with revulsion.
When people talk about the worst Supreme Court era, they’re often talking about Chief Justice Roger Taney, who headed the Court from 1836 to 1864. Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case widely considered to be the Supreme Court’s most shameful decision...
The Fuller Court is responsible for the spiritual successor to Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson. Sure, the Fourteenth Amendment required equal treatment under the law, but Plessy upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate train cars for Black people anyway. State-mandated segregation was perfectly fine as long as things were separate but equal, giving official sanction to Jim Crow laws…
The case for Roberts (derogatory)
If the current Court had limited itself to the frequent conservative projects of dismantling civil rights and protecting big business, John Roberts might not get the nod as Worst Chief Ever. But the Roberts Court boasts two additional features that make it an unmatched threat to democracy. First, the conservatives on the Court have gleefully abandoned any pretense of rigorous legal analysis or consistency with past decisions. That’s why you see those justices repeatedly mischaracterizing and omitting facts, shaping the narrative to fit their preferred outcome. It’s why the Court keeps doing this little trick of “stealth reversals,” where they overrule precedent without saying they are doing so, though to be fair, John Roberts loves openly overturning precedent when he feels like it.
Second, those same conservatives have also gleefully abandoned any pretense of checking or balancing the executive branch, instead letting themselves become a rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s worst excesses. That was inevitable after the sweet immunity deal Roberts gave Trump to wipe out his staggering amount of criminal charges. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the Court has routinely allowed the administration to implement objectively unconstitutional actions by pretending that they’re simply making a narrow procedural ruling rather than blessing Trump’s wholesale destruction of democracy. The Court has also gone to war with the lower courts, stepping in again and again to block rulings against the administration. www.publicnotice.co/…
