really important to emphasize that roberts' view of the executive branch as comprising a single individual is literally contradicted by the text of the constitution itself
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) July 21, 2025 at 9:26 AM
likewise for roberts’ vision of strict separation of powers, where the authority of one branch cannot touch another. this, as well, is contradicted by both the text and explicit logic of the constitution
now all of this is easily explained if you just assume that john roberts and his merry band of dipshits are working backwards from the conclusion that a republican president cannot be encumbered by any other actor or institution…
…but assuming he has a real vision in mind, it is not one with any roots in the history or tradition of the american political order.
Peter Shane, in the Atlantic, “This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built” [gift link]:
No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior justice in the majority—which is always the chief justice when he so votes—determines who will write the main opinion. Roberts reserved these milestones for himself.
And what milestones they have been. Roberts upheld the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” on the grounds that the president’s national-security role precludes courts from taking account of the bigotry undergirding an immigration order. He remanded a lower court’s enforcement of a congressional subpoena for Trump’s financial information, writing that “without limits on its subpoena powers,” Congress could exert “imperious” control over the executive branch and “aggrandize itself at the President’s expense.” He has come close to giving the president an untrammeled right to fire any officer in the executive branch at will. And he took the lead in inventing a presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that could exempt the president from accountability for even the most corrupt exercises of his official functions…
What America is witnessing is a remaking of the American presidency into something closer to a dictatorship. Trump is enacting this change and taking advantage of its possibilities, but he is not the inventor of its claim to constitutional legitimacy. That project is the work of John Roberts.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 while Roberts was clerking for then–Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, who represented, at the time, the far right on the Burger Court. Following his clerkship year, Roberts joined the Reagan administration as a special assistant to the attorney general, and then in short order was recruited in 1982 to join Reagan’s White House staff as an associate counsel to the president. That same year, the Federalist Society was founded, and those two entities together—the Reagan administration and the Federalist Society—accelerated the mainstreaming of what until then had been a marginal view of presidential authority under the Constitution: “unitary-executive theory.” The core idea of the unitary executive was that the president, as the single head of the executive branch, was entitled to direct how all discretionary authorities of that branch would be exercised. On every question, the president would be, as George W. Bush later said, “the decider.”…
The nation is now just six months into the experiment of what happens when a knows-no-bounds president takes office under a Court committed to a unitary executive. The results are alarming. As a matter of principle, anyone concerned with preserving robust constitutional checks and balances should be disturbed by a president’s overweening unilateralism, regardless of that president’s policy agenda. In Trump’s case, however, the threat to democracy is at its zenith because unitary-executive theory is being pushed to enable an authoritarian agenda on every front. Trump seems to believe he is effectively the unitary head not just of government, but of the nation. He appears determined to squelch any resistance within the government—and to force submission to his program by the media, universities, the legal profession, and apparently even entire cities. Roberts’s assurance that elections render the unitary president “directly accountable to the people” for so blatant an antidemocratic program appears meaningless against the backdrop of Trump’s authoritarian tactics…
Equally important: John Roberts doesn't care about the Constitution at all. He doesn't care about the American people. He doesn't believe everyone was created equal, endowed by our creator with inalienable rights such as Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness.
Which makes John Roberts a traitor.— Ido Amir (@idoamir.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 5:21 PM
I have no idea how much this is true of individual SCOTUS members, but a lot of professional ideologues develop a kind of habitual doublethink. At one level, they understand the assignment and are working backwards to rationalize whatever rule or action serves the interests of their own coalition…
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 1:16 PM
…but at another level they want to think of themselves as good and principled people, and will persuade themselves that’s not what they’re doing, even as they do it. Their indignation when accused of hackery is absolutely sincere, even though the accusation is true.
You often see the same thing with lawyers even on questions without any strong ideological valence. They’re taking whatever position is best for their paying client. But they’ll also convince themselves that position is actually correct (at least until a new client requires they argue the opposite.)
This sort of doublethink is a great professional asset, for the same reason well-trained actors will make themselves *really feel* the emotion their character is meant to be feeling. You are much more convincing if you can make yourself believe what you’re saying.
“OpusDei/FedSoc told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
— Unfunky In 5/4 (@inunfunky5.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 3:14 PM
satby
I just read a different source on the same subject. Good to see that Roberts is getting the scrutiny he more than deserves for dismantling the rule of law and our Republic.
bbleh
Roberts is obviously a royalist and all-but-obviously an outright Dominionist.
I have been fantasizing about a project to collect and dump publicly-donated p!ss and sh!t on the graves of Mitch McConnell and John Roberts after the Lord calls them home. It may require pretending to be, I dunno, a contract grounds-maintenance crew, or perhaps hiring one of those fire-suppression-retardent-dumping aircraft, but I REEELY wanna make it happen.
bbleh
Roberts is an overt royalist and an all-but-overt Dominionist.
I have been fantasizing about a project to collect publicly donated p!ss and sh!t and arranging somehow to dump it on the graves of John Roberts and Mitch McConnell when the Lord sees fit to call them home.
It may take establishing a fake grounds-maintenance company, or perhaps hiring one of those fire-retardent-dumping aircraft, but I REEELY wanna make it happen.
Steve LaBonne
I guess somebody had to come along to make Roger Taney look good by comparison. Alito and Thomas are fools; Roberts is an intelligent, evil saboteur.
Gvg
I really wonder how he thinks this benefits him? Giving a man like Trump power is dangerous, to even people like Rodgers. I can’t help wondering if he thinks this gets HIM power somehow? Anyway, I want his finances investigated. I want all of them investigated by real honest investigators because I think we can find reasons to get Congress to remove some of the worst.
of course plenty in congress could be crooked too. Right now the courts are more serious. Makes me sick. I used to trust them.
RepubAnon
One wonders if Roberts will change his mind if a Democrat is ever again elected President.
Steve LaBonne
@RepubAnon: One may, but I don’t.
Doc Sardonic
@RepubAnon: With a speed and gracefulness of form, that Flimnap himself would weep and curse himself for his sloppiness.
bbleh
@Gvg: IIRC he has been a believer in the so-called Unitary Executive “doctrine” (ahistorical and extra-Constitutional but whatever) since he was a staffer in the Reagan administration.
It’s a baseline philosophy for him. He thinks the Executive is the President’s personal playground, that he is king in his domain, and ANY constraints on that are Constitutionally suspect.
But at a certain point, I stop trying to decide whether men do evil out of some misguided belief or a genuine desire to do it. They do it, and that’s enough.
WTFGhost
This sort of doublethink *capability* is a great professional asset – but if you an easily argue both sides of a case, and argue that each decision would be correct, you need to be effing *humble* because you know you could have decided the opposite, with a similarly strong argument.
I mean, if I was on the SCOTUS, I’d hope I had the doublethink ability to form a strong argument on either side of an issue. And I really hope that I’d use it – to argue both sides, until I realized which one had to be the correct one, rather than being a Fed Soc member and having my vote predetermined. (That is what the Fed Soc does, right? I’ve never heard a convincing argument otherwise.)
New Deal democrat
As horrible as T—-p is, he would only have been able to get away with about 10% of the stuff he has done were it not for the GOP6 on the Supreme Court enabling him. It isn’t just the immunity decision, but the way they fast-track staying and reversing lower court decisions against him, while slow-walking or putting obstacles in the way of doctrines that might constrain him. All of which is opposite to how they treated Biden.
gene108
Speaking of Opus Dei, I’m not sure how this will affect U.S. adherents.
catholicnewsagency.com/amp/news/265189/auxiliary-vicar-of-opus-dei-charged-with-human-trafficking-an…
catclub
This. Well put
Princess
The model is Salazar or Franco.
p.a.
Don’t forget folks, if Dems win the presidency, Dems get this power. Which includes the power to tell SCOTUS to get fucked. How many divisions does John Roberts have?
bbleh
@p.a.: alas no. Because “this power” is what the Supremes say it is, and if they say it doesn’t apply to a Democratic President because Reasons, that’s the end of it. Consider that Biden was found unable to forgive student loan payments despite pretty clear statutory authority.
Note also that a lot of their favoritism has been bestowed via the “shadow docket,” in which they do not issue opinions or confer any “power” at all.
So I wouldn’t count on it. Nor, alas, would I count on a Dem President assuming it, much less quoting Stalin.
No One of Consequence
Court reform. I don’t mean to be impolite, but fuck them en masse, entire.
They presided over the destruction of norms, up to and including destruction of the spirit and letter of the law. They willfully, with malice aforethought, PERJURED themselves before their confirmation hearings. They all, to an individual, espoused the virtuousness of stare decisis and then proceeded to take flaming shits all over it like a group of demented Jackson Pollack wannabe’s.
As such, intentional, deliberate legal actions must and shall be taken to undo the carnage. I believe this will need to include a full and proper investigation into the corruption of the courts. Let the chips fall where they may.
Next President, relieve Roberts of his Chiefness and appoint Brown-Jackson as Chief. If the Broderites throw a hissy, convey this is comeuppance for the Merrick Garland theft. (And in hindsight, we should probably be thankful for it, though surely he would not have signed on to the burning down of our democracy.)
For what its worth,
-NOoC
Kayla Rudbek
@gene108: anything that goes against Opus Dei is a good thing in my opinion
Ramona
@WTFGhost: I see your point. Making the best argument for the opposite of one’s point of view is an exercise in epistemic humility.
Ramona
Ooh! The pictures this sentence induces in my mind’s eye!
BlueGuitarist
Madison, federalist 48: “unless these departments [legislative, executive, and judicial] be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others, the degree of separation…essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained.”
BellyCat
@BlueGuitarist: Prophetic.