How John Roberts Lost The Supreme Court
Trump demands total surrender.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling blocking Donald Trump’s illegal tariff scheme has enraged MAGA’s mad king. He now regularly lashes out at the Court, specifically the three conservative justices who ruled against him.
Trump recently ranted on social media, “Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the Supreme Court, which has become a weaponized Political Organization.” OK, that’s actually true. It’s the culmination of a decades-long right-wing project. Mitch McConnell “calculated correctly, that most of the most contentious issues in our society eventually wind up in the courts,” conservative columnist and author Mona Charen said in 2023 interview for McConnell, the GOP & the Court. “It is critical, if you want certain outcomes, to be sure that you have the right mix of judges.”
McConnell, with a willing assist from The Federalist Society, produced that “right mix” with three Supreme Court justices and more than 200 lower court judges confirmed under his leadership. McConnell forged the courts into a lethal weapon against liberal democracy. Trump is only mad now because the weapon he believed was firmly in his control has backfired on him.
“The decision that mattered most to me was TARIFFS!” Trump whined. “The Court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country, and instead decided to, potentially, give away Trillions of Dollars to Countries and Companies who have been taking advantage of the United States for decades.”
Trump thanked Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh for dissenting in the tariff case and effectively letting him do whatever he wants, which he assumed was the Court’s entire purpose. He seems especially annoyed that Bush family appointees Alito and Thomas are more reliably MAGA than his own — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett often defy them as if they have minds of their own and maybe even a few scruples between them.
“They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are.”
(Yeah, Richard Nixon had his secret tapes where he was paranoid and racist, and Trump has his public social media where he shares his ongoing mental breakdown.)
Trump also complained that the Supreme Court wouldn’t help him steal the 2020 presidential election: “They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, because they said that I, as President of the United States, did not have ‘standing’ to challenge it.”
“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” Trump fumed. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so. All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior!”
So, the rhetorical beatings will continue until Trump’s morale improves. However, Chief Justice Roberts would prefer that Trump not paint a target on his back. During an appearance at Houston’s Rice University, Roberts said, “Personally directed hostility is dangerous and it’s got to stop.”
“A lot of what we do is, of necessity, controversial. And … some of the criticism is very healthy. Some of it’s not,” Roberts said. “It’s important to keep the facts before you.”
Trump has no interest in facts, and he’s not about to stop his attacks. Last week, he said, “The Supreme Court cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Two of the people that voted for that, I appointed. And they sicken me. They sicken me because they are bad for our country.” (Watch below.)
Roberts helped make this possible in his infamous 2024 ruling that granted broad immunity to the president for any “official acts” committed while in office. Trump clearly considers bashing the Supreme Court and perhaps raising lynch mobs against the more recalcitrant members part of his “official acts” as a power-mad despot unrestrained by the law. Trump could send Seal Team Six after everyone in the Court but the Three Unwise Men and argue it was his “duty” as commander in chief.
As long as Trump’s in office, the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the free world, is in great peril. Yet Roberts is acting as if it’s 2022 and he can wag his finger censoriously whenever Democrats criticize the Court’s more egregious rulings.
“The notion that we carry forward the views of the people that appointed us is absurd,” Roberts said. “President George W. Bush appointed me 20 years ago. The idea that I’m carrying out his agenda somehow is absurd. … History is full of examples of presidents appointing people and being really surprised how they turned out, going both ways.”
Roberts is either willfully disingenuous or incredibly naive. McConnell was at least honest and self-aware when he gloated to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl: “It’s a lifetime appointment. The normal legislative activities we involve in, they take over, taxes go up. We take over, taxes go down. In other words, it’s very hard to get any kind of lasting impact. I felt that the way to get lasting impact is to put the right kind of men and women on the courts who hopefully will be there for a while.”
Yes, Roberts is indeed carrying out George W. Bush’s agenda 20 years later. That’s why he was nominated in the first place. It’s not a coincidence that the issues on which Roberts dares break are consistent with Bush’s own neoconservative views.
George W. Bush had no issue with an imperial presidency, but at the very least, Bush wasn’t a raving lunatic. Roberts might have thought his disastrous ruling would make life easier for the next President Dubya, but he arrogantly ignored his liberal colleagues who warned about the recklessness of granting those powers to someone like Donald Trump.
The great struggle within the federal judiciary isn’t between partisan hack judges and the supposed “impartial” jurists who simply call “balls and strikes,” as Roberts once described. No, it’s a battle between ideologies: Do the courts exist to serve the interests of right-wing conservatism or do they simply rubber stamp Trump’s latest insanity, regardless of legal precedent or observable reality? Judge Aileen Cannon is clearly in the latter camp, and she’s far more likely to replace Alito and Thomas when they retire within the next five minutes than someone like Roberts or even Gorsuch and Barrett. Roberts might have a lifetime appointment but his actual power is already deceased.
IF we survive it, the story of the Trump era will be not just the demented psychopath monster this country somehow knowingly elected but the total failure of our institutions which we naively assumed would hold the line. The media sanewashes him and promotes his madness because he’s good for business, the GOP tolerates and supports him because they think he holds the key to their power, Dems are so far up their own asses they have no coordinated strategy to deal with him, our allies tolerate him because they have learned dependence on us from decades of practice. So of course the courts have played along with him, giving him repeated mulligans and never punishing the crooks who serve him (how many Trump lawyers have been disbarred? How many served jail time for contempt? Did he ever pay a penny to Jean Carroll, who won her judgments years ago?).
A complete revolution and new Constitution is called for, but that’s never going to happen. Instead, the decline will continue. We are rotting from the inside.
They certainly shot themselves in the foot with that immunity ruling. God forbid that Cannon ever get a place there. She needs to be disbarred for those documents he hoarded and sold to foreign nationals.