Lisa Graves writes:

John Roberts ascended to the Supreme Court and for nearly two decades maintained a reputation as a fair referee. But most people really have no idea who Roberts is, what a destructive force he is to American jurisprudence, and how he has helped fracture our political system and our society.

In 2002, as part of my work for the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, one of my first tasks was to evaluate Roberts, whom George W. Bush had nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Roberts would impress some of the senators with his amiable confidence, his calm reassurances, and his easy smile. He looked like a Norman Rockwell–style embodiment of judicial restraint and rectitude. But a thorough examination of his record and career path convinced me that, his carefully constructed résumé and polished persona notwithstanding, he would make a seriously detrimental addition to the federal appeals court. In the Senate hearings on his elevation to the Supreme Court, he demonstrated his grit for disarming opponents when he proclaimed, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

The image of Roberts as an impartial umpire proved to be persuasive and durable, but instead of being a genuine expression of his temperament and approach, it was a meticulously planned and effectively delivered public relations strategy. He presented himself as a dedicated institutionalist who sought to uphold American judicial traditions. Far from being a protector, however, he has used his position as chief justice to orchestrate a pattern of extreme decisions that have unmoored American democracy from its foundations – and that was before Donald Trump’s three appointees joined the Court. Despite Roberts’s claims that there are no Republican or Democratic federal judges, he has established himself not as a fair referee but as a diabolically effective player rewriting the Constitution and remaking America in accord with his reactionary political agenda, as he strategizes how to move the ball forward and disarm the opposition.

Roberts’s reactionary docket has included destroying environmental rules that protect our planet from predatory billionaires, overturning legal precedents that limited access to deadly guns, forging the shield of religious freedom into a sword to attack equality and access to healthcare, decimating labor unions’ power to bargain for workers’ rights, and unleashing waves of billionaire spending in our elections in ways that corrupt our representative democracy and sever public institutions from vital traditions of impartiality. Democrats credited him with, and Republicans lambasted him for, saving the Affordable Care Act (dubbed Obamacare), but Roberts is playing for team GOP, and his occasional nods at moderation allow him to more effectively realize his long-term agenda. Kicking millions of Americans off of health insurance could have caused the GOP even bigger losses in 2012, and embracing the dubious legal theories against Obamacare would have undermined the power to enact tax policy that favors the rich.

Devastatingly, Roberts has systematically altered the very structure of our democracy by sabotaging voting rights and permitting illegitimate and undemocratic electoral maps that have all but eliminated incentives to seek compromise, fueling extremism and division. But Roberts’s masterstroke was alchemy: turning gold into speech by judicially rewriting the First Amendment to allow mountains of gold in the form of dark money to distort our elections. [Continue reading…]