Throughout his two decades as chief justice of the US supreme court, John Roberts has sought to project the notion that he is the ultimate institutionalist, striving (supposedly) to safeguard the venerated foundations of American democracy. But with each passing year, it has become increasingly clear that Roberts will be remembered as the chief justice who helped wreck numerous institutions vital to our democracy – they include fair, non-gerrymandered elections, a sane campaign finance system, the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters, and the bedrock notion that presidents are not above the law.

Roberts said in his confirmation hearings that he would merely “call balls and strikes” as chief justice, but now two decades later, many legal commentators are deeply dismayed that he has shunned the role of neutral umpire and instead spearheaded a rightwing judicial revolution that took a wrecking ball to many precedents, laws and institutions. Some have called him the worst chief justice since Roger Taney, who wrote the horrific Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that enslaved Black people couldn’t be citizens.

As one example of Roberts’ weakening our democracy, take congressional redistricting and the tradition of fair, democratic elections. Roberts wrote the majority decision in Rucho v Common Cause, a gerrymandering case that is largely responsible for turning redistricting into a disgraceful, hyper-partisan mess in which state legislatures can gerrymander as much as possible and, in effect, determine the results of congressional elections even before voters step into the voting booth. Roberts wrote that federal courts have no power whatsoever to overturn or interfere with even the most extreme partisan gerrymandering.

With that myopic, anti-democratic ruling, Roberts has allowed gerrymandering to turn many congressional elections into farces, meaningless exercises in which legislators pick their voters rather than the other way around. If Roberts truly cared about safeguarding democracy, he would........

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