Chief Justice John Roberts famously holds the public in utter contempt. He spends his annual report ignoring the critical issues facing the justice system while downplaying the judicial ethics crisis or waxing philosophic about the history of typewriters.
His latest bugaboo is blaming the American public for daring to question judges, going so far as to suggest calling out judges as partisan hacks in a blog post to burning crosses on the lawns of Southern federal judges in the 1960s.
It would be the sign of a deeply disturbed mind if he wasn’t so clearly bullshitting the public.
At least in his report he paid some lip service to a vague category of acceptable criticism, before proceeding to lay out that any criticism of him fell definitively into the unacceptable bucket. Over the weekend at a Fourth Circuit conference, Roberts further refined his “y’all need to shut up and take it” stance in the wake of the current Term. From CNN:
Taking criticism over the court’s opinions, Roberts said, is par for the course. But the chief justice also said that “usually” such criticism has more to do with the fact that a party lost rather than any sense they didn’t get a fair hearing.
“It’s not the judge’s fault that a correct interpretation of the law meant that, no, you don’t get to do this,” Roberts said. “If it’s just venting because you lost, then that’s not terribly helpful.”
If you have a problem with the Court, it’s because you lost and you’re just venting. It’s hard to imagine what the acceptable criticism column even looks like once criticism is dismissed out of hand as venting.
Back in the day, Amy Coney Barrett chided critics by demanding they engage with the written opinion. While always a bogus cop out in a shadow docket world, at least she once hinted that the courts would deal with substantive criticism in good faith. Fast forward to last Friday, and ACB blows off Justice Jackson’s dissent with this:
This is gibberish. To be clear, what so frustrates Barrett about the Jackson dissent is that the majority can’t cobble together a coherent answer. Which is why they prefer “not dwell” on it. Universal injunctions are “bad” to the extent we let litigants astroturf their way into binding the whole nation from a lonely Amarillo courthouse. There are reforms that can address that (e.g., requiring three-judge multidistrict panels to issue such broad injunctive relief) but the Supreme Court did none of that and instead just magicked away the tool entirely despite being blessed by volumes upon volumes of precedent. The majority ignores that history by claiming these injunctions didn’t happen back when it took six days to travel across state lines by horse and buggy and the government lacked the power to systematically impose blanket constitutional violations at light speed. Jackson explains that this death grip elevation of anachronism effectively removes the judiciary from the system of checks and balances — especially in a case implicating civil rights where the government can rely on practical barriers to a courthouse as a means of avoiding compliance. To which Barrett declares with all her academic bona fides… nuh-uh.
It’s an embarrassing sidestep unbecoming the Court, but it does confirm that the John Roberts school of “all criticism is unacceptable” has taken root even among the justices themselves.
But while the Chief was at it, he also joked about the Court’s tradition of dumping its hottest of garbage decisions on the last day before bolting out of town.
“Things were a little crunched toward the end this year,” Roberts said, suggesting the court might “try to space it out a little better next year, I suppose.”
Roberts doesn’t believe any of this shit, but assumes you’re too stupid to question it.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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