A Rogue Supreme Court

Today’s Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, is likely to go down as one of the worst Supreme Courts in American history.

It is a radical Court.

If you look at the nearly 20-year record of this Court since Roberts was appointed Chief Justice in 2005, you will find a rogue Court that specializes in reverse-engineering Court decisions and ignoring precedent as it steamrolls over decision after decision reached by previous Supreme Courts.

Reverse engineering means that the Roberts majority decides what it wants to do – usually on ideological grounds or personal biases – and then figures out a way to rationalize its opinion to get there.

Ignoring precedent means that the Roberts Court gives little or no weight to the decisions of past Justices – appointed by both Republicans and Democrats – or to their rationales.

This is not how a United States Supreme Court should operate.

Here are just six decisions that show the rogue Roberts Court in action and help explain why public confidence in the Court is near an all-time low.

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the campaign finance ban on corporate expenditures in federal campaigns, so they overturned decades of precedent and almost 100 years of national policy, opening up the corrupting campaign money floodgates in Washington. (Citizens United decision, 2010)

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the voting rights law, so they gutted it, ignoring past decisions upholding it. (Shelby County decision, 2013)

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision upholding the limit on the total amount an individual could contribute to candidates and political committees in an election cycle, so they overturned 48 years of Supreme Court precedent to strike it down. (McCutcheon decision, 2014)

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the 1973 Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s right to choose so they overturned 50 years of precedent to impose their own personal views, leading to a resurgence of state abortion bans. (Dobbs decision, 2022)

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision requiring a court to uphold a government agency’s interpretation of a statute as long as it is reasonable, so they overturned it, endangering our nation’s environmental, health, and other protections. (Chevron decision, 2024)

➤ The Roberts majority didn’t like the idea that a former President could be convicted of criminal acts, so they invented out of whole cloth a ruling that former Presidents are entitled to presumptive, if not absolute, immunity for official actions taken while President. (Trump v. U.S. decision, 2024)

In their presidential immunity decision, the majority sacrificed a foundational principle of our country that nobody is above the law, and, in essence, gave Presidents a license to commit crimes. This shameful, destructive decision is perhaps the worst opinion issued by the Supreme Court since the Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857.

The Roberts opinion paid almost no attention to the actual case before them which focused on the events surrounding Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and exploit the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol. Instead, the broad brush of their opinion establishes that a President is now above the law, in a manner that befits a king or dictator, and that would have the Founders turning in their graves.

These are not one-off examples. Instead, they demonstrate a pattern and practice of the Roberts Court that repeatedly deviates from the jurisprudence of previous Courts, and shows that the Roberts majority is driven by personal bias and ideology at the expense of the Court’s integrity and the American people’s rights.

On Monday, President Biden proposed a three-part plan to address fundamental problems with today’s rogue Supreme Court. The plan includes 18-year term limits for Justices, rotating appointments, a binding and enforceable ethics code, and a constitutional amendment to overturn the Court’s disgraceful presidential immunity decision.

This plan opens the door to building a new, broad-based national movement to counter the abuses of today’s Supreme Court.

A recent Fox News poll found that 78 percent of Americans support term limits for Justices and a Politico poll from last fall found that 75 percent of Americans support a binding code of ethics for Justices.

These reforms will take time. And it will be a hard fight to enact them.

They provide, however, an important framework for citizens to publicly press the Court to return to the judicial branch envisioned by our Founders, one that does not offer personal biases disguised as jurisprudence and is held to high standards of integrity and ethics.