Chief Justice Roberts would like you to simmer down. (Nati Harnik/AP)
When Mitch McConnell decided that black presidents only get to be president for seven years and refused to hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, there was only one man in the country who could have stopped him: Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts could have spoken up. He could have urged the Senate to perform its Constitutional duty. He could have explained how the Senate’s actions were hurting the Court.
Instead, he said nothing. To be clear, John Roberts has spoken about the broken confirmation process before(Opens in a new window). He spoke about it, presciently, ten days before Antonin Scalia died. But when the chips were down and the Senate was actively destroying any semblance of a non-partisan approach to the confirmation process, John Roberts was conspicuously silent.
Now that Republicans like Roberts have arguably gotten what they wanted and stolen a Supreme Court seat, suddenly John Roberts has found where Mitch McConnell has been hiding his tongue. Asked by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson at an event there about the confirmation process, Roberts said(Opens in a new window):
“It is a real danger that the partisan hostility that people see in the political branches will affect the nonpartisan activity of the judicial branch. It is very difficult, I think, for a member of the public to look at what goes on in confirmation hearings these days, which is a very sharp conflict in political terms between Democrats and Republicans, and not think that the person who comes out of that process must similarly share that partisan view of public issues and public life.”
John Roberts stood by like a deaf-mute while Merrick Garland twisted in the wind for ten months. John Roberts couldn’t even be bothered to ACKNOWLEDGE that the Court had been operating understaffed during his annual state of the courts memo(Opens in a new window). John Roberts arguably cast the most important “pro-Trump” vote(Opens in a new window) when he neutered the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder(Opens in a new window).
But now, NOW, John Roberts wants to speak out about the “dangers” of partisan hostility.
Roberts will go down in history as the man who presided over the Court as it devolved into mere political hackery. Mitch McConnell broke it, but Roberts was the only man who could have stopped it. The institution has been diminished on his watch.
John Roberts Criticized Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Before There Was a Vacancy(Opens in a new window) [New York Times]
Chief justice says partisan confirmation battles create ‘real danger’ for Supreme Court(Opens in a new window) [ABA Journal]
Earlier:
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect(Opens in a new window). He can be reached @ElieNYC(Opens in a new window) on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.