This Is the Real John Roberts

[Zorro]

He is a judicial minimalist who seeks to avoid sweeping decisions with disruptive effects.

What is up with Chief Justice John Roberts? Has he been cowed by political pressure to move left? Is there a method to his apparent maddening pattern of trading off conservative opinions with liberal ones?

The chief justice has sided with the Supreme Court’s liberal justices on some of the biggest cases of the term, like decisions to invalidate the Trump administration’s effort to rescind the DACA program and Louisiana’s abortion-provider regulations. In others, he has stuck with the conservatives.

Chief Justice Roberts’s voting pattern certainly fails to conform to a predictable ideological pattern. But there is a pattern nonetheless. He is a conservative justice, but more than anything else, he is a judicial minimalist who seeks to avoid sweeping decisions with disruptive effects.

This has been the hallmark of his jurisprudence since he joined the court in 2005. And while there are significant exceptions (most notably, Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated a major component of the Voting Rights Act), Chief Justice Roberts’s anti-disruption jurisprudence has become more pronounced the longer he has been on the court.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court.html

[WhiteTara]

1. Except for Citizens United, they mean

That was more than disruptive. Followed by gutting the Voting Rights Act. That was the only push needed so far. Wait for others.

[stillcool]

2. he chooses his gimme's

when it really matters he can be counted on to fold.

[Scruffy1]

3. Exactly.

He's smart enough to give a little on small things to maintain the appearance of fairness and to keep the Supreme Court viewed as "legitimant" by the idiotic press. He must have got hundreds of these op eds in the last few days The truth is what Andrew Jackson "asked": "How many troops does the Supreme Court have?" when he went against them on "Indian relocation. Without this appearance of legitimacy they would lose respect and power. Allowing nine political appointeees to overrule democracy is a farce. Throughout US history they have mostly been the defenders of the oligarchy. I would like to see a Supreme Court of at least 30 people selected so it would be hard for the party in power to stack the deck, which is all too easy with only nine.Also there needs to be ethics rules for them.

[lagomorph777]

4. Just trying to give the illusion of sanity to stave off expansion of the bench.

Too late, fucker. You're about to find your power diluted.