John Roberts: The Chief Justice Who Broke American Democracy |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
John Roberts: The Chief Justice Who Broke American Democracy
President George W. Bush announces Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice (2005)
When John Roberts appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, he offered one of the most memorable metaphors in confirmation hearing history. “Judges are like umpires,” he told senators. “Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” He promised to call balls and strikes, nothing more. Twenty years later, that promise stands as one of the most consequential deceits in the history of the American judiciary. Roberts has not been an umpire. He has been a pitcher, a batter, and the groundskeeper, and he has consistently rigged the field for one team. The result, measured across ten landmark decisions, eight of whose majority opinions Roberts wrote himself, is a Supreme Court that has done more lasting structural damage to American democracy than any politician, including Donald Trump, has managed to inflict.
The indictment begins with the right to vote. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts authored the opinion gutting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with a documented history of racial discrimination to obtain federal preclearance before changing their voting laws. Roberts declared that the racial conditions justifying preclearance were relics of the past. States across the South responded within hours, enacting new voting restrictions that proved his optimism catastrophically wrong. In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), the Court rewrote Section 2 of the VRA so narrowly that voting laws producing stark racial disparities were rendered effectively immune from challenge.
And the capstone arrived on April 29, 2026, when the Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the majority, joined by Roberts, struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That map had created a second majority-Black district, drawn specifically to comply with Section 2 as courts had interpreted it.........