Legacy of the Roberts Court

Welcome to another episode of This Fucking Guy, the series where we highlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's hysteria podcast. And I'm Alyssa Mastermonico , the other host of Cricut Media Safaria podcast. Today we're going to celebrate the merciful end of another very stupid Supreme Court term by finally letting it rip on the man whose photo should appear alongside the Wikipedia entry for banality of evil . Yes, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts embodies America's version of the family in the zone of interest , living in a bubble of after shave and Catholic mass as his decisions are directly responsible for the pain and suffering of millions , and perhaps the collapse of the American Experiment, but I am sure his lawn looks great. John Glover Roberts, Jr. was born on january twenty seventh, nineteen fifty five in Buffalo, New York. He was the second of four children and the only boy, his dad, John Sr. worked for Bethlehem Steele. Little John or Jackie, as he was called when he was a kid, was a serious, striving Dork, who was extremely gifted academically. Think the conservative male equivalent of Lisa Simps on derogatory. One family member who biographer Joan Biscubic spoke with said that one of his childhood nicknames was sober puss . In the era of the Carvel Cookie Puss, he was a sober puss , but alas, an ap nickname as John Roberts is both serious and a pussy. When Roberts was ten, his father moved the family to Long Beach, Indiana, a tiny beach town on Lake Michigan in order to take a job as an executive at a nearby Bethlehem St eel plant in Burns Harbor, which is about forty miles south of Chicago. Long Beach was one of those towns that was specifically founded for white people, and for years, property deeds stipulated that the homes were not to be sold toack or B Jlewish folks. According to author Lisa Graves, quote, Deep into the twentieth century, Long Beach advertised itself as a vacation land within a highly restricted home community where all residents are Caucasian Gentiles. Fun. Which leads me to wonder, is Clarence Thomas John Roberts' first black friend ? Seriously, it might be. Roberts grew up in a lily white town and then he left the safety of his parents ' large tutor style house to attend high school at an all boys private Catholic school called La Lumiere. La Lumiere was one of those schools that was founded in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools , Brown voard of Education. A lot of private religious schools were founded during that time with the implied intent of allowing white families to send their kids to schools amongst only other whites. The thirty Rock Joke version of this is when Jack Donnegy references a fictional Catholic school called Our Lady of Reluctant Integration. Well, in that spirit, the separate but equal mother was smiling down on La Lumiere, as the first black student to ever attend La Lumiere didn't arrive until nineteen seventy when Roberts was a sophomore. At La Lumiere, which is French for the light, and not a reference to the wacky Jerry Orbach character from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Roberts was a superstar student. He loved Latin so much that he took five years of it during his four years there. Dork . There were only twenty boys in his class and because students were expected to play sports, Roberts ran track, wrestled and played football. He was a pretty good wrestler winning all but one match his senior year in the one hundred and thirty two pound weight class. He was not a very good football player though, due in part to the fact that he weighed one hundred thirty two pounds. Roberts' snobby school would travel in blazers for sporting events , showing up to play at public schools, looking like the rich kids from a pug rated nineties sports comedy. Over the summer, he worked for a special program for executives kids at the Steel Mill where his father was an executive, earning between twelve and sixteen dollars an hour, which would be the equivalent of one hundred and four to one hundred and thirty eight dollars per hour today. So crazy. We are getting closed. Oh my god. In case you're wondering if Roberts was a ladies man the ans,wer is a resounding no. In fact, he seemed to harbor a specific animus toward girls. In a nineteen seventy two issue of his school newspaper The Torch, Roberts came out swinging in an editorial against the preposterous idea of being educated alongside girls. Here's part of what he wrote, Alyssa, quote, oh, the presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than Catholicizing. I would prefer to discuss Shakespeare's double entend re and the lattice rectum of conic sections without a blonde giggling and blushing behind me. Said by someone who had never made anyone blush or giggle. This was Roberts as a teenage boy in nineteen seventy two, one year before the Supreme Court would rule on Roe v Wade, making abortion illegal across the country. Even then, he was a grouchy old man. His piece also included this little nugget implying that girls would also ruin sports. Quote, imagine the five cheerleaders on the sidelines with black L's on their chests screaming, give me an L Give me a break , give me a break. Roberts also participated in his school's drama program. In one school play, he was cast as Pepperman Patty, as in the lesbian coded female friend of Charlie Brown, for the role, Roberts wore a dress. But Pepperman Patty doesn't wear a dress , she wears like soccer shorts. Yeah . Maybe John Roberts dressed in drag for the love of the game. Apart from the drama club gender bending, Roberts wasn't much of a rebel. One former classmate said the cool boys used to sneak off into the woods near the school and smoke, but not little sober puss, John preferred to study Latin. Roberts graduated at the very top of his class and became his school's first student to attend Harvard University. He thought he wanted to be a history professor. Ugh, but alas for all of us, the law came calling, and after graduating Suma Kum Laude after only three years at Harvard, Roberts enrolled in Harvard Law School. Roberts was the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review and classmates included future senators Russ Feingold and Spencer Abraham, as well as a handful of other future members of Congress and leaders in the legal field. There is no evidence that at any point John Roberts got any bitch es whatsoever in college or law school. It was the nineteen seventies. There were much groovier guys with hairy chests all over Boston who have forgotten more about making a woman come than John Roberts would ever know. But the future justice wasn't focused on chasing the blonde he imagined annoying him by giggling behind him in Latin class in high school. He just wanted to be the best at being the worst. After graduating Harvard Law School, Roberts snabbed a job clerking for second circuit judge Henry Friendly, one of the most cited and important judges in American legal history. Friendly and Roberts got along well and Friendly recommended Roberts clerk for Supreme Court associate Justice William Renquist. Renquist would go on to become the chief justice after Robert's time working for him. But before becoming the most conservative member of the court at the time, William Renquist had helped what author Lisa Graves described as quote, a brigade of white Arizon ans in Operation Eagle Eye, which was basically a club that existed to intimidate minorities who were trying to vote. Like many awful white men in the early nineteen eighties, Roberts was infatuated with Ronald Reagan and yearned to work for the Reagan administration. Roberts' awful boss, William Renquist, recommended him to another awful white man, Kenneth Starr, the chief of staff of the attorney general, who was, you guessed it, also an awful white man named William French Smith , one of the architects of the nineteen eighties drug war. Which went great. Yeah, the drug war was a huge success and nobody ever did drugs again. Great job, Reagan administration. It wasn't long after Roberts became an assistant to the attorney general that Roberts was given the unpleasant task of talking to a woman when he helped Sandra Day O'Connor prepare for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Talking to a giggling blushing blonde must have been so demeaning to him. After he'd washed all the cooties off, Rober ts turned his attention to his nemesis, the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five aimed to protect voting rights, invoking amendments fourteen and fifteen of the Constitution. Section two of the Act made it illegal for state and local governments to take actions that suppress the ability of minorities to vote. Congress would later go on to strengthen that portion of the Act to clarify that state's intentions don't matter if the outcome is suppress ion of the minority vote. And Section five mandated that states and localities with a history of election malfeasance would have to get preclearance from the federal government before they change their own voting laws. Now, in the early nineteen eighties, Roberts was particular ly vexed by sections two and five. In one memo, he claimed that a renewal of the Voting Rights Act would quote establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation. Roberts has always play acted like an institutionalist preserving the law, but even as a low level Reagan kiss ass, he was gunning to upset the apple cart of established precedent. He wrote to his mentor, Henry Friendly, quote, This is an exciting time to be at the Justice Department when so much that has been taken for granted for so long is being seriously reconsidered. Doesn't sound very starry decisie to me . Years later, when Roberts was being considered for a Supreme Court position, documents revealed that Roberts was often to the right of the Reagan administration, especially when it came to anything related to affirmative action or civil rights. Yeah, Roberts once wrote a memo that claimed affirmative action led to sub par candidates for jobs. He expressed a desire to narrow Title II which guarantees equal rights for women and men in education. He had some cookie beliefs about AIDS too. In nineteen eighty five, the CDC in Atlanta published that current medical science indicated that casual person to person contact quote appears to pose no risk for HIV transmission. This mattered because prior to that information being published, there was a lot of fear about AIDS out there. I remember reading a weekly reader that said it could be passed via toilet seat. That's true. Right. And as a result, people with HIV were even more isolated and marginalized. But that wasn't enough to satisfy John Roberts' history major and apparent amateur epidemiologist , President Reagan was poised to deliver a press conference wherein he echoed the CDC's findings that kids at school could not get it from casual contact with other kids at school. But Roberts flagged that line writing, I do not think we should have the president taking a position on a disputed scientific issue of this sort . He has no way of knowing the underlying validity of the scientific conclusion which has been attacked by numerous commentators. The jury was still out in Robert's opinion , which was just based on vibes . After possibly messing with the public health response to AIDS, Roberts left the Reagan administration for private practice in nineteen eighty six, but just three years later the ,irresistible siren song of Ken Starr drew him back into public service . Robert served as a principal deputy solicitor general under George H. W. Bush. Now, the office of the Solicitor General is a real work withhorsein the government. The staff at OSG represents the US government in all cases before the Supreme Court. The office decides which cases to appeal, prepares legal briefs, determines the legal positions the government will take, and argues cases in which the U. S. is a party. They will also file Amicus Cure or Friend of the Court briefs in cases where the federal government is not a direct party but has big feels about something before the court. Roberts would later claim in his confirmation hearing that positions he argued for as Deputy Solicitor General were in no way indicative of his personal beliefs, but actually that might not have been true. For what Roberts argued as Deputy Solicitor General pretty much matches up perfectly with his stances that the Supreme Court would take under his leadership decades later. Solicitor General Roberts argued against abortion for the weakening of the separation between church and state against affirmative action and other programs designed to benefit disenfranchised groups, etc. In nineteen ninety one, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill the vacancy left by Justice Thurgood Marshall, thus replacing one of the greatest jurists in American history with one of history's great perverts. The Bush administration nominated Roberts to fill the seat that Thomas's flabby ass had been warming, but then Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was convinced to slow walk Roberts' nomination until after the nineteen ninety two election. Bill Clinton defeated Bush and Roberts nomination expired without confirmation. John once again flounced out of government to the private sector, where in nineteen ninety six, when he was forty one years old, he married Jane Sullivan , another conservative religious lawyer in her forties he'd been dating for a few years. Prioritizing becoming a high powered lawyer and delaying marriage and family until you're in your forties. That's not very project twenty twenty five. No , it's not , it was too late for the Robertses to have their own biological children, and so they ended up adopting two kids who were born a few months apart in two thousand. They gave both kids J names like their parents. Dane Sullivan Roberts is a bit of a DC power broker between two thousand seven and twenty fourteen, she earned more than ten million dollars as a head hunter for top law firms. In twenty fifteen, a former colleague would sue Jane, alleging, among other things that her husband had not been fully transparent about the nature of his wife's work or how she got paid. She wasn't as he'd represented a salaried employee of a law firm, rather, she was paid directly by several top firms when she played matchmaker between former public officials and law offices who wanted to employ them. At least one of those law firms had business before the Supreme Court. A conservative justice having issues with ethical disclosures couldn't be the Roberts Court. I know what a surprise. But back to the broken road that led John Roberts to Scotus. Even in private practice, Roberts was no stranger to the high court between nineteen ninety three and two thousand three. He argued eighteen Supreme Court cases and twenty cases in appellate court, often on the side of corporations that were suing the government. So he was a familiar face to DC conservatives and his reputation as an ideologue who presented a fairly believable reasonable guy act was well known. Roberts is full of shit, but he's convincing enough. And now we've arrived in the year two thousand. Al Gore, very low rise jeans. George W. Bush, the closest presidential election in memory. George W. Bush's camp desperately wanted the state of Florida to stop the recount that threatened its electoral victory. And so they lit the sober puss bat signal and called super lawyer John Roberts down to Florida to fight the noble fight against vote counting. Keeping people from voting is what John Roberts was born to do, and so he flew into action among, the tedious assoles he worked alongside was Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative legal goober who would later serve on the Supreme Court. During the Bush V Gore Florida Fracas, some of the more pugnacious Republican operatives like Matt Schlap and Roger Stone participated in what was later known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. It's just as stupid as it sounds, guys. I watched it in real time. But it was a demonstration involving hundreds of pale guys in business casual who looked like they would place Satan in a radio head video , protesting outside of the facility where Florida election officials were conducting a recount on the ballots submitted by voters in Miami Dade County. Now Miami Dade County had enough ballots left to count that it was looking as though Algor might overtake Bush , thus handing him Florida and the White House. Now the demonstration turned violent, people were trampled, kicked , there was punching, and the canvassing board shut down the recount. Kavanaugh and Roberts were not getting their pretty little hands dirty though. They were working on the legal challenge to the recount, which eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O'Connor cast the decisive vote in favor of Team Bush in Bush v Gore. Roberts' invaluable totiism was rewarded with a nomination to the federal bench once Bush took office. But the fates were once again not on his side. As Senator Jim Jeffords switched from Republican to independent, thus erasing the GOP's one seat majority in the Senate. Democrats refused to consider Bush's judicial nominees once again, and Roberts sat there again , always the bridesmaid and never the bride. At least he was making over a million dollars a year as a lawyer so he could use his money to wipe away the tears of his thwarted ambition. That is until two thousand two, when in America still on the throes of its post nine hundred eleven mania handed over control of the Senate to the President's Party and Robert's nomination for the DC Circuit made it out of committee. He was confirmed by unanimous voice vote in the Senate. Before Roberts had even taken his seat as a judge, his name was already appearing on shortlists for potential Supreme Court vacancies. That's because, by this time, the Republican zeal about its project to capture the court was at a fever pitch. In his late forties, Roberts was young. And we're talking judge young, not like soccer young. He had a long track record as a slavish foot soldier to the cause, but the controlled demeanor that offered the project plausible deniability , like a trapper sneaking up on a panicking trapped animal whispering sh asy, easy, never intending to free the animal, but rather they're planning on clubbing it to death. Graphic, is the trapped animal America in this analogy? Yes, yes, it is. Okay. As a federal judge on the DC circuit, Roberts authored forty nine opinions. In one of them, he found that DC police were not acting improperly when they detained a twelve year old black girl for eating in a metro station. There was a zero tolerance policy for eating and rules or rules. Roberts' thin resume from the bench was nevertheless enough to conv Georingeced W. Bush that he was ready for prime time, not just ready for prime time, ready for the Supreme Court. This was all part of a right wing strategy to stack the bench with dedicated partisan hacks who would be there for decades, rather than principal jurs.is Cdonsictervatives viewed the Supreme Court as unfairly stacked in favor of liberals. This despite the fact that by the time Roberts was nominated in two thousand five, thirteen of the previous fifteen nominees to the Supreme Court had been made by Republican presidents. Wow, it's not unfair enough in their favor . As luck would have it for Roberts not for the nation, just as he was poised to fill the seat of retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the chief justice croaked, leaving an even more powerful vacancy. President George W. Bush could have nominated one of the sitting associate justices to be the chief, but instead he opted to nominate Roberts. Roberts sold himself to the Senate as a neutral umpire, judges, insulated from Democrat ic pressures precisely so they could find law rather than shape policy with no license to impose their preferences from the bench. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented , I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench , and I will decide every case based on the record according to the rule of law without fear or favor to the best of my ability . And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat. I dreamed to live long enough to see a female Supreme Court justice use real housewives language describe their jurisprudence . Not everybody was sold on Robert's very measured institutionalist act. Illinois's junior senator Barack Obama voted against Robert's confirmation, predicting that he'd agree with Rober ninety five percent of the time, but the five percent of the time they diverged gave him pause. The future president indicated he didn't trust Roberts because Roberts had far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak . But his opposition wasn't enough. And on september twenty ninth, two thousand five, fifty year old John Roberts was confirmed as the second youngest chief justice of the Supreme Court in American history . As Chief Justice Roberts quickly garnered the reputation of being the most uptight motherfucker on the planet, with a carriage and vibe of a man who is perpetually constipated . One well placed source tells me that he's been known to adjust his clerk's ties if they're askew. I would, I don't know what I would do if my boss did that to me. He also has been known to get angry at restaurant hosts if they don't have reading glasses for him to use. Like he expects restaurants to just have John Roberts' reading glasses on hand? Yep. Ask the hostess at Founding Farmers about it. You love that restaurant, Alyssa. That's top tier . But apart from his tightly wound adult Saturday in a morning cartoon breakfast cereal ad Scht. Obama's prediction about Roberts Zelda would be proven right almost immediately. Roberts was installed on the court shortly after Justice Samuel Alito, who continues to be a fissure in the anus of democracy , but alongside Alito, the court's new conservative majority got right to work. At first, Alito and Roberts were kind of the wonder twins, which must have made Clarence Thomas feel like the left out party in the poorly executed threesome. I'm so glad you had to read that line, Alyssa. Thank you. Yep, you're welcome. In two thousand seven, the Roberts Court ruled against a grandmother who had been paid far less than the men doing her job at a tire plant. Samuel Alito, writing for the new Conservative Major ity imposed near impossible new timing burdens on pay discrimination plaintiffs. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the rare step of reading her dissent in that case aloud from the bench, perhaps the advent of her being turned into a judicial meme. The political backlash was real enough that the very first bill Obama signed as president the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act specifically overturned the interpretation Roberts had endorsed. The same term , the court upheld the federal ban on so called partial birth abortion, despite having struck down a nearly identical law just seven years earlier. Same court, opposite answer in under a decade. Exactly the kind of precedent shredding Roberts' umpire characterization was supposed to prevent. If Roberts has a tell, it's the word narrow. He keeps insisting his religion rulings are modest little things, then slowly turns up the temperature until the frog is boiled. The chief has a clear method. Starve the Establishment clause, that's the part of the Constitution that's supposed to keep the government out of religion, while pumping the free exercise clause full of trucker grade meth untilod separation of church and state means almost nothing and religious freedom means the government can be made to fund and host faith. The incremental creep is the part legal critics like Erwin Chemarinsky flagged early . T Inown of Greece vs. Galway twenty fourteen , the five majority essentially carved out an establishment clause exception for prayers before legislative sessions. A result Chimerinsky argued only makes sense if you've already decided the separation principle barely matters. Then came the money cases. In twenty seventeen's Trinity Lutheran, Roberts wrote that Missouri couldn't exclude a church preschool from a recycled tire playground resurfacing grant insist,ing the holding covered only that, just playground rubber, nothing more. The narrow rule metastasized quickly through twenty twenty's Espinoza and into twenty twenty two's Carson vs. Macon, where Roberts himself wrote that Maine must funnel public fund ing to religious schools. But the mask off moment is Kennedy vs. Bremerton twenty twenty two, the praying coach case. The court's conservative majority sold it as a sympathetic story, a humble coach offering a brief, quiet, personal prayer at the fifty yard line and was persecuted for it. In her descent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor brought receipts. She attached a photograph showing the coach surrounded by kneeling players , the public and members of the opposing team. She argued the prayers were demonstrably public and coercive and that coercion need not be explicit, particularly when children are involved. In other words, the court rewrote the record to reach the result it wanted. The same supercharged free exercise clause that lets churches collect playground grants also in the Roberts Court's hands becomes a permission slip to opt out of laws protecting other people , like women, LGBTQ Americans, and the kind of minorities that civil rights laws were written to shield in the first place. It's a license to discriminate dressed up as conscience. Hysteria is brought to you by Quintz. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day, lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quints. They focus on high quality essentials, think breathable linen, soft, organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces, like one hundred percent European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at just thirty two dollars. Their denim is soft and easy to wear and their organic cut and sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Or in my case, in my freezing cold office, I can put it on in the morning, go for a walk for lunch, and it's still breathable. It keeps me nice and cool outside and keeps me warm when I'm inside in the ice box that is crooked media. Everything at Quintz is priced fifty to eighty percent less than similar brands. Quintz works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you're paying for quality, not brand markup it'.s And not just cl othing, Quintz has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. I love Quintz because my clothes often get tiny little handintspr on them because my kids are messy. I like to have clothing that holds up to being stain treated over and over again. I gotta say I really love the Quince cotton t shirts. They're really they look really nice , elevated style, but I can also wash them when my kids get them dirty and I have like several in every color. Elevate your summer wardrobe, go to quints. com slash guy for free shipping on your order in three hundred sixty five and ret dayurns now available in Canada too. That's QINCE dot com slash Guy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quince dot com slash Gy. History is brought to you by Zebotics. I'd love to tell you I'm one of those women who can have three glasses of wine and still wake up glowing, but I'm not somewhere in my thirties, the morning after a few drinks started to hit different. That's why I started drinking zibiotics pre alcohol. Zebiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiot ic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. The last time I used pre alcohol was at a wedding , a wedding that had like three days of celebrations involving alcohol . And thanks to pre alcohol, I felt great the next day. Between weddings the U. S. open and the first real Lake Weekend of the year , June barely leaves a Saturday open. Don't let a rough morning after cost you Sunday, drink pre alcohol to stay ahead of it and make the most of every weekend this month. Remember to head to zbiotics dot com slash guy and use code guy at checkout for fifteen percent off . So you're running out of closet space. The good news, you don't need to stop shopping. You just need to start selling with the real . The Real Real is the world's largest and most trusted resource for authentic ated luxury resale. Whether it's that mini bag that can't even fit your phone or those boots you never fully broke in, the real handles everything from photography and copywriting to shipping and pricing. So you can just sit back, get paid and make room for things that actually feel like you. And with ten thousand plus new arrivals every single day from top designers like Prada, Celine, Louis Vuitton and Luve offer up to ninety percent off retail. You're bound to find something perfectly on brand to fill that extra closet space with. Plus, this may only, you can get an extra two hundred dollars to shop when you sell for the first time. Make room for what feels like you. Go to the real . com to start selling and get your extra two hundred dollars to keep shopping at the real dot com that's the real dot com terms apply . Buy more, save more at Scandinavianign Dess Furniture this Fourth of July . For a limited time, save two hundred dollars instantly for every thousand dollars you spend in store. It's the perfect way to complete your look for less or splurge on your dream piece from living room to bedroom . Stop by a local showroom or shop online at scandavian designs. com Scandinavian designs we make it simple. You make it home . In twenty fourteen's Burwell v Hobby Lobby, Roberts Court ruled five four that a for profit craft chain could refuse to cover contraception in its employee health plans because the owners objected on religious grounds. Alito writing swore the holding was narrow, just the contraceptive mandate, nothing more. Hey, I recognize that move. Ginsburg's fiery dissent called it a decision of startling breath that let employers opt out of almost any laws they deemed incompatible with their beliefs and warned it would deny legions of women coverage they were legally owed. Her most cited line of arithmetic. An IUD can cost roughly a month's full time pay and minimum wage, so religious liberty here meant a b oss's theology overriding a worker's paycheck and her doctor. Crucially, Ginsburg saw the spillover coming and named it, asking whether the same logic would soon shield business owners who claimed religious grounds for refusing to serve racial minorities or gay customers , and she was right . In twenty twenty, the court stretched the ministerial exception so far that lay teachers at religious schools were barred from bringing ordinary dis ability and age discrimination claims, translation . Call enough employees, ministers, and a whole category of civil rights protection evaporates. In twenty eighteen's Masterpiece cake shop, a baker who refused a wedding cake for a se samex couple won, but narrowly on the technicality that Colorado's Civil Rights Commission had shown hostility to his faith, the court pointedly ducked the real question . Then in twenty twenty one's Fulton V Philadelphia, which Roberts wrote, let a Catholic agency keep a taxpayer funded foster care contract while refusing to certify same sex couples, the unanimous framing masking a big structural win for the religious objectors. Capstone came in twenty twenty three's three hundred and three creative, a six three ruling that a web designer has a free speech right to refuse to build wedding sites for gay couples. The first time the court has blessed a public accommodation business turning customers away based on who they are. The colorful, damning footnote, the supposed real world request that helped frame the case from a gay man named Stuart appears to have been completely made up. When reporters tracked the alleged Stewart down, he said he'd never sent it, was straight, and was already married to a woman. The lower courts didn't actually hang standing on that request and the designers side disputes any suggestion they faked it , but the optics are sus a landmark license to discriminate ruling built atop a wedding request that may never have happened to remedy discrimination that hadn't yet occurred. It's the same one as the playground cases and the voting cases, a narrow , sympathetic ruling, a baker, a coach, a craft store, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker establishes the principle. A few terms later, this principle is doing heavy lifting it's supposedly never claimed. Each step religious exercise is elevated, each step somebody else's statutory protection quietly retracts. The court's sympathies now run more to the people doing the discriminating than to the people getting discriminated against. Roberts has been the stick up his ass steward of that drif t. It's hard to choose which of the scotus rulings Roberts presided over will go down in history is the most catastrophic, but one good candidate is twenty ten Citizens United. Citizens United was the name of an organization that was the brainchild of Floyd Brown, the Republican operative who'd made his name in nineteen eighty eight, producing the race baiting Willie Horton ad. Bush and Dukakas on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakas not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton who murdered a boy in a robbery stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received ten weekend passes from prison. Orton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes, Dukaka son crime . Yikes. Every time I see it, I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's terrible. How did that happen? Two decades later, his nonprofit made a feature length hit piece on Hillary Clinton and wanted to run it on cable during the two thousand eight primaries. The problem was that the McCain Feingold Act barred corporations from bank rolling electioneering communications close to an election, and a movie whose entire purpose was to kneecap a candidate looked an awful lot like one . I can't think of any other politician in history who has shown such a disrespect and a contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law as Hillary. And I represented Richard Nixon's best friend and I knew Richard Nixon and I'll tell you something, she know Richard Nixon, she's worse . What definitely so Citizens United sued in a small, almost technical dis pute can this one outfit air this one movie began climbing toward the Supreme Court? The case nearly gave itself away at oral argument in march two thousand nine, pressed on how far the government's theory reached the Deput,y Solicitor General conceded that in principle, the same logic could let the government ban a book that crossed the line into advocacy. When the justices met in conference, the vote was a narrow five four for citizens united, and Roberts sat down to write exactly the kind of modest opinion the case called for, a ruling that freed the movie but left the campaign finance law standing. Then Anthony Kennedy got peckish. He drafted a sweeping concurrence, arguing the court should stop t inkering and declare a broad first amendment right for corporations to spend in elections. And enough of the Conservatives drifted towards his version that Roberts quietly withdrew his own narrow draft. That is when the trouble started. Justice Stevens handed the main dissent to David Sutter who was on his way out the door, and Seuter used it to call out the chief. He accused Roberts of bending the court's own procedures to manufacture the outcome he wanted, a retiring justice torturing the chief in print. Very messy. Very messy. Something really important to know about John Roberts is that he's both vain and delusional. He can't stand anything that besmirches his own self image as a principled institutionalist and fancy little law boy because he needs people to believe that's what he is in order for the court to retain any shred of credibility that it has. So rather than let Suter read him to filth or rush out a sweeping ruling that looked rigged, he engineered a do over. On june twenty ninth, two thousand nine, the last day of the term, the court stunned the litigants by ordering Citizens United be reargued at a rare special session that September, with newly written questions explicitly inviting the parties to argue whether the nineteen ninety precedent upholding corporate spending limits should be overruled. It was a beautifully cynical box. The liberals could no longer complain about being ambushed because the st wereeak nows spelled out in black and white, but everyone knew the five conservative votes were already locked. The cake was baked. The goose cooked. The fix was in. When the lawyers returned that September, it was one of the first cases for brand new justice Sotomayor who taken suitor's seat but couldn't change the arithmetic. The end came on january twenty first, twenty ten. Roberts assigned the opinion to Kennedy who turned his old concurrence into a five four ruling for the court . Throwing open the door or for corpations and unions to spend unlimited sums on elections. Kennedy waved away the obvious worry with a phrase that is aged like an egg salad at an Arizona picnic that quote Ingratiation and access are not corrupt ion and that the appearance of influence wouldn't make voters lose faith in democracy. Stevens in his dissent pointed out the obvious corporations can't vote. They can't run for office. They aren't actually members of the society whose elections they are now free to flood with dark money. The fallout was exactly what the dissenters feared. Citizens United birth the superpac. Outside groups poured more than a billion dollars into the twenty twelve election. That's more than all outside spending report ed from nineteen eighty through twenty ten combined. Senate races alone went from about eighteen million dollars in outside money in two thousand eight to roughly two hundred sixty million dollars in twenty twelve, much of it untraceable. Obama was angry enough to scold the justices to their faces at the state of the Union with Roberts sitting a few feet away. You know he hated that. Okay, now I remember it. Now we've gone over how John Roberts is the reason American elections are so fucking annoying. Let's revisit Roberts' long animosity toward voting rights. As a young Reagan administration lawyer, Roberts fought to install an intent test into the Voting Rights Act section two, a much harder standard for plaintiffs to me et than what the standard was, which was outcome. Congress brushed him aside, he lost, hold that thought. Fast forward to two thousand seven, when Louisville and Seattle voluntarily desegregated their schools, Roberts said no, treating intentionally segregated nineteen fifties Topeka and a two thousands voluntary integration plan as legally identical. His famous quip The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Reads less like reasoning than a slogan and it became the philosophical engine for everything downstream. Just noticing race was the reason that racism existed. Clever. Clever little Jackie. Roberts didn't have an issue with people noticing race when the court ruled in twenty twenty five that immigration agents were not violating people's constitutional rights when they stopped them for looking Hispanic. Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench on that one and got a standing ovation. Unfortunately, America doesn't run on standing ovations, it runs on dogged pricks who don't care if what they're doing makes everyone else's life worse. When it came to the Voting Rights Act, it wasn't just Section two that Roberts was gunning for. In two thousand nine's Namudo v holder, Deputy Solicitor General Neil Kitel argued that the VRA section five pre clearance was working and that the tiny share of rejected election law changes proved the deterrent had warned the South against trying any electoral funny business. Roberts pounced glasses off with the old elephant whistle jab. I have this whistle to keep away the elephants. Well there are no elephants so it must work . In twenty thirteen ' Sshelby County V Holder, Roberts defenestrated section five , the preclearance requirement for historically racist districts. To do it, he simply refused to engage with a twelve thousand plus page congressional record documenting ongoing voter suppression in states covered by the VRA, the colorful damning detail. Judge David Tatal deliberately cataloged the abuses in his lower court opinion, including cancelled elections, precincts moved at the last minute , and polling places relocated to sites of past racial violence because he feared Roberts wouldn't read the record himself. Judge Tatl was right . Roberts substituted his own declaration of racial progress for the factual findings of the courts below. The very findings the Supreme Court is supposed to defer to unless they're clearly factually incorrect. The predicted result arrived fast, freed from preclearance, states rushed to erect new b allot barriers. Once Donald Trump handed the Supreme Court a Conservative supermajority in twenty twenty, the Roberts Court went hog wild. In twenty twenty four, they asked what remained of the burned out shack that was the Voting Rights Act, finishing off section two , as after Shelby, the consequences were immediate. Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and others raced to redraw maps that erase minority majority districts in favor of lines that benefit white Republicans. It was clear that Roberts wasn't calling balls and strikes. He was subbing himself in as a pitcher. In no case was that clearer than a twenty twenty four case called Loper Bright v Remondo. For forty years, what was known as the Chevron deference told courts to def er to federal agencies to interpret some ambiguously written laws, since they were the experts on the subject matter they concerned, not judges. But in Loper Bright, the court declared that judges, not agencies would now resolve every stat utory ambiguity, reasoning that interpreting statutes is simply the court's job and requires nothing but legal reasoning. Of the court's decision to transfer power from the executive branch to the judicial branch just because dissenting justice Elena Kagan wrote, make no mistake . Today's decision is a power grab. Loperbright transfers power to the court itself at the expense of the agencies, which is the precise inverse of the judicial restraint conservatives championed before they had a six three majority. Robert's public persona is the institutionalist who scolds Trump for disrespecting the judiciary . His courts output is the most aggressive expansion of presidential power in modern history. In twenty twenty four is Trump versus the United States, the six justice majority, the same bloc that claims to be bound by the Constitution's original meaning, abandoned originalism entirely to invent a presidential immunity that no one had ever even asserted before immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts defined so expansively as to cover everything within the outer perimeter of the office, excluding only acts manifestly or palpably beyond his authority. The Constitution gives immunity to members of Congress for legislative floor acts and says nothing of the kind about the president. So the court just made it up. Sotomayor's dissent supplies the unforgettable line under this rule, a president would be immune even if he ordered the Navy Seal Team six to assassinate a political rival. Trump's old boast about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue suddenly looks a lot less like hyperbole. After Chevron, the court went into what I'd classify as berserker mode. What's berserker mode? You know, like in the scene in Scarface when Tony Montana has lost his mar bles, it's kind of it's kind of like that. It's like when somebody right there at the edge and they just completely out of control. Okay. Berserker mode activated. Berserker mode activated. Roberts's twenty twenty four year end report was whiny as hell in it. In it, he warned about threats to justices from doxing and disinformation , but then lumped in completely legitimate criticism of judicial actions along with terrorist adjacent activity. In Roberts' eyes suggesting political bias in a judge's adverse rulings without a credible basis was menacing the courts in the same way say swatting a justice's house would. Getting mad at John Roberts online is terrorism. Yes. The Roberts Court also heavily utilizes something known as the Emergency or Shadow Docket to greenlight a lot of Trump's more extreme moves with little or no explanation. It really should be called the pussy docket because it allows justices to avoid individual scrutiny for politically unpopular moves, like when they stayed injunctions against mass firing of federal workers gutted the education department messing with federal grants, Justice Jackson has warned that the court was using the emergency docket to legislate. On january twentieth, twenty twenty five, Trump signed executive order one hundred forty one six zero, which declared that babies born in the United States would no longer be recognized as citizens unless at least one parent was a citizen or lawful permanent resident . The trouble was the fourteenth Amendment, whose texts grant citizenship to nearly everyone born on U. S. soil, and supreme court precedent settling the point since eighteen ninety eight. The lower courts were like, uh , you can't amend the Constitut ion with a memo. Judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington each blocked the order nationwide with one Seattle judge calling birthright citizenship a fundamental constitutional right and accusing the administration of trying to rewrite the Constitution by Executive Fiat , the first, fourth, and ninth circuits all refused to lift those blocks. Losing the Constitutional argument everywhere, the administration didn't ask the Supreme Court to defend the order on the merits. It asked a different, narrower , far more technical question, could a single district judge issue a nationwide injunction blocking an order for everyone in the country rather than just for the specific people who suit? In other words , leave aside whether the policy is legal. Let's talk about the referee's powers. The argument on may fifteenth, twenty twenty five ran more than two hours, and the justices clearly saw the stakes underneath the procedure. Justice Kagan told the Solicitor General, his plan makes no sense, asking why the government would ever bring the constitutional question back to the court if it could simply keep winning by avoiding it. Justice Jackson warned that his position turned the cour ts into a catch me if you can game in which the executive could ignore any ruling outside the handful of districts where it lost. Justice Sotomayor offered a chilling hypothetical if a president ordered nationwide gun confiscation, could a judge really protect only the named plaintiffs? And the justices freted openly about maternity ward chaos with Kavanaugh asking, who exactly would tell hospitals what to do if the injunctions vanished. The decision landed june twenty seventh, twenty twenty five, and it was six three down ideological lines. The opinion held that universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable power Congress gave federal courts back in the Judiciary Act of seventeen eighty nine, and limiting relief to only what each named plaintiff needs. In other words, no more nationwide injunctions. Courts only protect the people who sued. The crucial move. The court never ruled on whether the birthright order was constitutional at all. It left the policy's legality untouched and instead quietly disarmed the main weapon judges had been using to stop it. The dissents were furious. Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, argued the order was p atently unconstitutional and that stripping courts of universal injunctions would leave constitutional rights meaningful in name only for anyone who couldn't afford to file their own lawsuit. Jackson wrote a separate , even sharper solo to send. The lasting prize for the executive wasn't this one order, it was that the court's fastest tool for halting any illegal nationwide policy had been hobbled across the board. While Kavanaugh's concurrence all but invited the government to keep bringing these fights to the Supreme Court's own emergency docket, funneling the power to issue or withhold nationwide relief up to the justices themselves. As our friends on strict scrutiny would say, very moderate, very institutionalist. In twenty twenty five, Roberts's year end report was an inscrutable lecture about the history of the Declaration of Independence seemingly written from a universe where the court had not just further enabled this country's descent into Christofascism. But it'd be unfair to characterize the Roberts Court as one that completely rolls over for Trump on everything . They just roll over for Trump on like ninety percent of things. What about the ten percent of Scott's rulings under Trump two point zero that haven't been dogs. I get it. What about all the runaways that John Wayne Gacy didn't murder? Yeah , Roberts has issued the spare half assed rebuke of Donald Trump when he feels like the public is starting to suspect that he might be full of shit. In february twenty twenty six, Roberts personally wrote the opinion striking down most of Trump's tariffs, joined by the three liberals plus Gorsuch and Barrett. Trump lashed back, calling the justices unpatriotic and disloyal and saying he was ashamed of them. Roberts also rebuked Trump in twenty eighteen when he disparaged a judge who disagreed with him. Roberts lectures Trump about judicial independence in the Ap olitical dignity of the bench and then his court hands that same president a king like immunity the founders never wrote down. He defends judges as neutral servants of equal rights while authoring and joining the rulings that concentrate power in the presidency and in the court itself. The rhetoric is institutionalist, the jurisprudence is maximalist. Whether you read the gap as nivete, strategy or self dilution, it's the central irony of the Roberts era. The Empire who keeps insisting he only calls balls and strikes has quietly rewritten the rule book to favor the powerful corporations over plaintiffs, states voters, courts, over agencies, and the president over nearly everyone. The real peppermint patty would never . So there you have it, Alyssa, John Roberts. Where do we think he lies in our matrix of fucking guys?