I Have Found Yet Another Thing to Disagree With John Roberts About
There is no meaningful criticism of the Supreme Court that he’d consider legitimate.
Around this time every year, Supreme Court justices embark on an informal whirlwind PR tour, working diligently to persuade the public that the rights the Court is preparing to take away are really nothing to worry about. This week’s short straw went to Chief Justice John Roberts, who in a conversation with graduating students at Georgetown University Law Center opined on the most urgent crisis facing the Court today: people being mean to him in public.
“The Court has obviously made mistakes throughout its history, and those should be criticized,” Roberts said. But although he allowed that such criticism is a “good thing,” it should never take the form of “trashing the justices,” he said. “I just think that doesn’t do any good.”
Supreme Court justices often make comments like Roberts’s, which reflect their perception of their privileged role in democracy: that as humble jurists deciding apolitical legal questions—umpires calling balls and strikes, one might say—they are entitled to float above the partisan rancor that otherwise permeates Washington. The problem, of course, is that their definition of “ad hominem against the justices” typically includes any suggestion that this basic framework is wrong, as well as any criticism of the Court they do not personally agree with.
In Roberts’s mind, pointing out, for example, that he is a lifelong Republican whose jurisprudence consistently aligns with the Republican agenda is as beyond the pale as any profanity-laced tirade to which he might be subjected on the street. When he says that “trashing” the justices “doesn’t do any good,” he does not mean for normal people; he means for his continued ability to recast Federalist Society dogma as the product of neutral legal process.
As I have written on this website too many times to bother counting, this argument is—sorry for the ad hominem—dumb and condescending, and you should not feel constrained by any of it. In my view, it is fine to say whatever you feel about a politician who is responsible for, among many other things, making democracy weaker, college more expensive, and Trump president a second time. At Georgetown, Roberts went on to downplay the impact of criticism within the Court, telling students that a justice’s “harshest critics are usually colleagues.” I encourage you to take this as both an indictment of your efforts to date, as a challenge going forward.
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" ... his continued ability to recast Federalist Society dogma as the product of neutral legal process." Well said, that. I shall not annoy Mr. Willis by suggesting for the umpteenth time that BvG's John Roberts is and has been the most dangerous man in America for decades, Jim Crow for the new century. Unelected, for life, is a corruption twofer. This aggression won't stand.