Why Trump’s 'absent presence' in John Roberts’ report is so 'unsettling': political scientist

During his 20 years as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts has been releasing annual year-end reports. And on December 31, the George W. Bush appointee issued his "2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary."

Roberts has writing his reports for SCOTUS under four different presidents: Republicans Bush and Donald Trump and Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And Trump's effect on the chief justice's 2024 report is the thing that political science professor Austin Sarat finds "unsettling" in an op-ed published by MSNBC on January 2.

"Trump is what literary critics call an 'absent presence' in Roberts' 15-page document," Sarat explains in his article. "He is like a ghost, whose presence is felt if not seen."

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Sarat (who teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts) argues that Roberts' 2024 report "rightly highlighted" the "very real dangers to this country's long tradition of judicial independence that we now face" but "failed to name" President-elect Trump as "their source."

"Aside from the usual statistics on the courts' workload," Sarat notes, "the report made news because of what he writes on Page 5: 'I feel compelled to address four areas of illegitimate activity that, in my view, do threaten the independence of judges on which the rule of law depends: (1) violence, (2) intimidation, (3) disinformation, and (4) threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.' Some of what Roberts named might have been best described as a self-inflicted wound or perhaps been best addressed to the radical conservatives on the Supreme Court who seem to value loyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause more than their duty to decide cases without fear or favor."

The Amherst professor continues, "Beyond that, the threats that the chief justice mentioned all seem to have their roots in the authoritarian playbook that has guided Trump and his MAGA acolytes. He leaves it to his readers to connect the dots."

Sarat agrees with Roberts on the need for "judicial independence" but complains that he "lets judges off the hook" — including the "partisan" far-right Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court.

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"The absence of outside influence does not guarantee that judges will be independent and impartial rather than partisan warriors," Sarat writes. "Judges as partisan warriors seems a fit description for some of the current crop of Supreme Court Justices…. The chief justice would have served the country better if he had ended 2024 with four simple words: 'Stop it, Donald Trump.'"

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Austin Sarat's full op-ed for MSNBC is available at this link.