In his first term as president, Donald Trump built a conservative 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Ever since, the nation’s highest court has repeatedly issued increasingly extreme, far-right decisions on topics of abortion, race, the environment, corruption, and much more.
The Supreme Court has eliminated federal protections for abortion rights; limited the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, protect Americans’ drinking water, and limit ozone pollution; gutted federal agencies’ ability to implement regulations generally; opened up long-standing regulations to new challenges; made it easier for states to enact racial gerrymanders; eliminated college affirmative action policies; found businesses can discriminate against LGBTQ+ customers; permitted public school employees to lead students in prayer; decided that companies can pay public officials gratuities, or thank-you payments, for corrupt contracting decisions; and broadly shielded Trump from criminal prosecution for any so-called official acts he committed as president.
Trump is so proud of the conservatives on the court that he frequently praised the justices, individually by name, at 2024 campaign events — thanking them for their “courage” in deciding to overturn Roe v. Wade, so states could ban abortion. At a September rally, Trump called the conservative justices “very brave” and argued that “people should be put in jail” for criticizing them.
The Supreme Court’s chief justice, John Roberts, is now echoing Trump’s demand that people stop criticizing him, his colleagues, and other federal jurists — while continuing to pretend that judges are not political.
In his annual end-of-year report, issued on Tuesday, Roberts wrote that public officials (read: Democrats) “regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.” Roberts added, “Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others.”
The idea that Democrats have sought to intimidate the justices is laughable — save for a few lonely voices, they have said shockingly little and done nothing to attempt to rein in the court’s ongoing right-wing rampage. While Democrats have called out conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for failing to disclose, in apparent violation of federal ethics rules, luxury travel provided by right-wing billionaires, they ultimately did nothing about that either.
Roberts — who reportedly drove the court’s far-reaching decision in the Trump immunity case — has long pretended to be an apolitical actor, who would simply call “balls and strikes” as a jurist.
It’s a ridiculous notion: Supreme Court justices — and federal judges generally — are political appointees. But since he was appointed by George W. Bush and confirmed in 2005, Roberts has overseen the court’s dramatic right-wing shift — which has been further turbocharged by Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court is the most conservative it’s been in nearly a century.
This is no accident: Roberts and his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court were all selected and confirmed with support from right-wing dark money interests — ultimately, with funding from some of the same people who have gifted the conservative justices undisclosed private jet rides and superyacht trips, given them lucrative teaching gigs, and steered consulting payments to at least one justice’s spouse.
Roberts and his colleagues were appointed to the Supreme Court to carry out a conservative political agenda — and that’s exactly what they have done. No one should pretend otherwise.
