FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts poses during a group portrait at the Supreme Court in Washington, U.S., October 7, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
When then-President George W. Bush chose John Roberts to head the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the combination of justices was much different from what it is today.
The High Court leaned conservative and had some hardcore social conservatives (Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia). But conservative Ronald Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy had strong libertarian leanings, joining the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in some landmark gay rights rulings. And Donald Trump's first presidency was more than a decade away.
In 2025, Roberts oversees a hard-right 6-3 GOP-appointed supermajority, half of which was nominated by Trump. Lisa Graves, who heads the judicial watchdog group True North Research, believes that Roberts is doing little to discourage the MAGA agenda — a point she emphasized in an interview with Mother Jones' Pema Levy published in Q&A form on October 3.
Referencing 2022's Trump v. the United States, Graves told Levy that "the immunity decision signaled that Roberts has moved more into MAGA Land."
Graves continued, "He has really taken the driver's wheel in terms of embracing a MAGA agenda, and that's reflected in the January 6 trio of cases last year — and in particular, the unprecedented immunity decision, and is reflected in the rulings this year, these emergency rulings. He is embracing the White House’s position on immigration in a way that is not consistent with most of the business community that does not support these sort of aggressive attacks on immigration and our employment systems."
In Trump v. the United States, the High Court's GOP supermajority ruled that U.S. presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts but not for "unofficial" acts. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her scathing dissent, warned that the decision gives a dangerous amount of power to the federal government's executive branch.
"At his confirmation hearings," Graves recalled, "(Roberts) affirmed that no president is above the law, no one is above the law. And then, when it mattered most for him to stand for that principle, he not only abandoned it — he aggressively wrote this very expansive opinion, ignoring the language of the Constitution that says in two places, the job of the president is to faithfully execute the law. And nothing could be less faithful than breaking the law."
Read the full Mother Jones interview at this link.