President Donald Trump sits at the epicenter of negative forces, corrupting nearly everything he and his administration have touched. As numerous experts have warned, his behavior has trickled down throughout society in what is known as the leader-follower effect. Because MAGA is an authoritarian populist movement and a type of personality cult, these dynamics are greatly magnified.
Yet Trump and Trumpism require followers, enablers and other powerful allies to do their work, and one of the most significant is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
In her new book “Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights,” legal scholar Lisa Graves argues that Roberts has consistently betrayed American democracy, the common good and the institution of the court itself to reshape the rule of law in service to Trump’s authoritarian agenda and the radical right.
I recently spoke with Graves about the right-wing capture of the Supreme Court and Roberts’ central role in delegitimizing the once-trusted institution in service to Trumpism.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How are you navigating Trump’s return to office?
Like most Americans, I’m outraged by what Trump and the hyperpartisan operatives installed on the Roberts court have done to undermine our Constitution and long-protected freedoms. Trump is building an authoritarian regime in America to empower and enrich himself further. But I remain an optimist at heart. I choose hope. I draw strength from the extraordinary leaders who came before us — leaders of the array of civil rights movements — who faced impossible odds.
We’ve often heard phrases like “No one is above the law,” and “The law is blind.” Now we’re hearing my personal favorite: “The walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” These narratives about America were always exaggerations. It’s now become clear they are absurdities.
One of the most significant moments at John Roberts’ nomination hearings to become the chief justice of the United States was his affirmation that no one is above the law… Roberts made that promise to the American people 20 years ago, but then, when it mattered most — when Donald Trump asserted that he is above the law — [he] broke that promise.
The [Supreme] Court easily could have let the lower court ruling against Trump [having presidential immunity] stand, but Roberts orchestrated a ruling that effectively pardoned Trump retrospectively and prospectively. That unprecedented and partisan edict paved the way for Trump’s return to power.
The Constitution provides zero immunity for presidents from criminal prosecution. But John Roberts chose to be the kingmaker, giving Trump king-like powers last year, and then this year mowing down well-founded and well-grounded temporary restraining orders [that allowed] an array of unilateral and extreme dictates to proceed…
The Constitution provides zero immunity for presidents from criminal prosecution. But John Roberts chose to be the kingmaker, giving Trump king-like powers last year, and then this year mowing down well-founded and well-grounded temporary restraining orders [that allowed] an array of unilateral and extreme dictates to proceed — even though doing so will cause irreparable harm [by letting Trump] transgress constitutional provisions, laws passed by Congress and long-standing legal precedents.
How did the Supreme Court become so corrupted and taken over by the right-wing?
As [I discuss] in my book “Without Precedent,” the court was targeted for capture by the right-wing legal movement, most notably the Federalist Society and its longtime leader and fundraiser, Leonard Leo. The reason the Roberts court is so out of step with the American people, and emboldened and aggressive in its actions to defend Trump…is because those judicial offices have been captured by a billionaire-backed initiative that did not want fair and impartial judges on the Supreme Court. They wanted ringers who would advance their right-wing agenda.
So when George W. Bush had his first opportunity to put someone on the court following [his father’s] appointments of David Souter and Clarence Thomas, they chose John Roberts. Leonard Leo, Brett Kavanaugh and David Leitch vouched for John Roberts as — unlike Souter — someone they could rely upon to advance the right-wing agenda through the law. [They believed he would] use the courts to overturn key precedents that would revert the law to the robber baron era when the court did the bidding of the wealthiest few in blocking popular legislation and constitutional provisions written to protect the rights of ordinary people.
Roberts is at the helm of this captured court, and he is using the judicial power not like a fair umpire but like a Republican operative — a “Trumpire” — determined to aid Trump wherever possible by bending, breaking and rigging the rules.
The Roberts court has been corrupted by that right-wing takeover, and also [by] the personal corruption of individual justices that investigative journalists have uncovered, including [the] millions of dollars in gifts that Clarence Thomas has received from billionaires but failed to disclose until press coverage pressured him to do so. And Roberts has repeatedly failed to object when compromised justices fail to recuse themselves from cases in which there exists a reasonable, or more than reasonable, perception of impropriety or actual conflicts of interest by other members of his far-right faction. It is unreasonable and illegitimate for either Thomas or [Samuel] Alito to have participated in any of the Jan. 6 cases.
What about accountability? Limits?
I can’t tell you who or what the right-wing justices feel beholden to. I can only tell you what their actions reveal: A sense of impunity to act in a highly partisan way, to aid Trump in ways that have led to multiple constitutional crises and to carry out this extreme alteration of our laws in favor of Trump. The American people understand that this court is out of control. Public respect for the court is at an all-time low… Roberts is presiding over the most untrusted Supreme Court since polling about the court began decades ago. The lower courts, which are trying to follow the rules, are acting fairly, but not this arrogant, hyperpartisan MAGA faction dominating the Supreme Court.
They have a complicit Congress bowing to Trump, which is being aided by the court’s decisions disenfranchising Americans via gerrymandering.
John Roberts has said that if Americans don’t like what SCOTUS is doing, it’s “just too bad.” [The] Roberts court is acting like it can’t be held accountable, but the American people can prove that wrong by demanding court reform and the restoration and expansion of our rights, by electing people who will hold this court accountable.
The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act are being gutted by the Trump administration and the MAGA Republicans. What is Roberts’ role there?
John Roberts cut his teeth [in the Reagan administration] assailing amendments to protect the Voting Rights Act. He failed…and the VRA was reauthorized until 2007.
Then, in 2006 — after Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court — Congress reauthorized the [VRA] a year early, on a wide bipartisan basis, with only a few members of Congress voting no. But opponents of the [VRA] said out loud that they didn’t need a majority in Congress; they just needed a majority [on] the court, which they [now] had thanks to [George W. Bush’s] appointments of Roberts and Alito.
A few years later, Roberts took his pen like an ax to the VRA in [his majority opinion for Shelby County v. Holder]…he gutted sections four and five…that required preclearance by the Justice Department to voting rules changes in jurisdictions that had a history of discrimination.
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Roberts ignored a mountain of congressional findings, thousands of pages of record showing that the Voting Rights Act needed to be reauthorized for another couple of decades, in part because there were continuing attempts to oppress black voters by white dominated state legislatures. But John Roberts disregarded those findings that he was required to defer to.
The Supreme Court is not a fact-finding body — it is supposed to defer to the factual findings of lower courts and Congress. Instead, [he] has arrogantly used his position, with the willing help of other Republican appointees, to decimate key enforcement provisions…
Literally the second the Shelby County decision was announced, states began to implement laws to make it harder for Americans to vote.
This was one of three rulings by the Roberts court — including the Citizens United decision in 2010, which unleashed the power of billionaires to exert political influence — that have profoundly affected the outcomes of our elections and harmed the integrity of our representative democracy.
Conventional wisdom has long been that the members of the Supreme Court, and specifically, the chief justice, are caretakers who are concerned about the legacy of the institution and respecting precedent. That is clearly no longer true with the right-wing MAGA-controlled Supreme Court.
John Roberts has tried to present himself as an “institutionalist.” But when you look at his record as a whole, you see how he has used the court as a political arm to advance an agenda he’s held for decades as a Reagan revolutionary who has supported Republican administrations and assailed civil rights laws.
Roberts has gotten a lot of mileage out of the PR image he constructed for himself as a fair umpire “just calling balls and strikes” during [his confirmation hearings]. But he has not behaved like a fair umpire. He’s acted like a player on the field, like a quarterback, moving this right-wing agenda forward in ways that have decimated our representative democracy and our rights.
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[He] has put his fist on the scales of justice for Donald Trump in numerous ways, while allowing the court to invent fake doctrines to thwart Democratic presidents. The Roberts court has decreed that Trump can continue his illegal, authoritarian actions and has signaled that he has the votes to bend the law, rewrite the Constitution and statutes, and overturn legal precedents to aid him and the agenda to regress the law.
They’ve done it already. John Roberts is not a good caretaker of the court. In my view, he will ultimately go down as the worst chief justice in history.
Trump has repeatedly signaled he will try to stay in office for a third term. This is a blatant violation of the Constitution. What do you think the Supreme Court will do?
The Constitution is clear: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” It’s clear that some of Trump’s closest boosters — like Steve Bannon and [Tennessee GOP Rep.] Andy Ogles — are trying to move a third term forward, while Trump recently admitted that he cannot run again. And yet, Trump’s website is selling 2028 hats, and who knows what machinations he might pursue over the next three years to further consolidate his power.
It seems almost everything is up for grabs in the smash-and-grab era of Trump. The Roberts faction on the court has proven they’re willing to ignore precedent, history, the plain text of the Constitution and common sense to help consolidate Republican rule and power — and to aid the regressive agenda of Donald Trump and his GOP.
