Why did a rich Catholic Harvard history grad get here?
John Roberts is a confusing puzzle to me. Here is a son of wealthy parents who attended expensive Catholic K-12 schools, Harvard University and Law School — often rated the best in the country — majored in history and still wants to make the most ignorant, mentally unfit, malignant narcissist president a powerful authoritarian king in a democracy. He acts like he is leading a “smash and grab” robbery of the big time constitutional jewelry store.
The Aug. 17 issue of The New Yorker published Margaret Talbot’s revealing “The Delusions of John Roberts” with a subhead reading “The Chief Justice insists that his Court isn’t biased even as it keeps making dramatic leaps rightward.” Talbot quotes long-time Supreme Court critic Linda Greenhouse’s list of the right-wing wish list he has fulfilled: Overturn Roe v. Wade, reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right, eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions, elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape, curb the regulatory powers of federal agencies, undercut the rights of transgender people and immigrants, damage the Voting Rights Act and expand presidential powers.
“Trump, a vengeful chaos agent, has taken the Court’s rulings on executive power as a license to obliterate entire departments, gut the federal work force, fire officials at independent agencies designed to be insulated from political pressure, and treat the Department of Justice as his personal law firm and police force,” Talbot writes.
So, the big question is, why did Roberts lead the sins of the Court when he probably would not want to even play golf with the religious right’s “Chosen One?”
Here is a list of characteristics from people who know him best
Roberts seems to be a country-club type guy who seems to be a man out of time today. One source said he doubted that Roberts had ever shook the hand of a person who was paid by the hour.
Roberts and wife sold their home in Chevy Chase for $3.4 million a few months ago. Roberts is the wealthiest member of the Supreme Court with a net worth of an estimated $25 million according to Forbes. They own two vacation homes in Maine and have a time-share in Ireland where they like to pay golf.
As late as 2007, he had the temerity to say: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Evidently, he has never been exposed to students who go to poor, underfunded schools where the rain runs through the roof, who eat unhealthy food, who live in inadequate houses or on the streets of big and little cities that ignore the poor or arrest and put them to jail. His Catholic high school did not enroll girls. He has always lived in gated wealthy communities with security. He entered Harvard as a sophomore because of many Advanced Placement courses taught in his high school. A former classmate said Roberts told him he did not go to Stanford Law School because the Stanford recruiter did not wear a tie. That is part of the story of his upbringing. How many of the 25,000 homeless adults and children who live on the streets of Los Angeles are going to or graduate from the best public and private schools in the nation?
“Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said during his confirmation hearing. “Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.”
But umpires also call players out or safe — or even throw managers out of the game because of an argument. As a player, coach, park board manager of summer baseball programs, or umpire of thousands of baseball games, I have probably made thousands of mistakes by being in the wrong position to make the correct call. Judges in courts have been lousy umpires for thousands of years. Look at all the laws passed to correct, change, or eliminate past decisions.
How will history judge Robert’s Supreme Courts, if we have one?
What is Roberts’s opinion about the effect of climate change on our lives? Does he realize he may be one of the major principals sentencing Planet Earth to death by heat and fire? Does he think it’s a hoax created by his monarch Donald Trump? What happened to the Paris Agreement signed by Barack Obama and hundreds of nations?
According to a New York Times article, Roberts “acted like a bulldozer” behind the Obama administration plan to attempt to reach the limits of temperature growth of 1.5 degrees Celsius as requested by the Paris Agreement. He personally pushed the Supreme Court to block the Clean Power Plan designed to require Divided States of America electricity companies to reduce carbon emissions by a third within fifteen years.
A personal note: Corky and I lived in D.C. for nine months in 1954-55 while I was assigned to Quantico, Virginia, the site of the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. There was beautiful, normal weather every day, always in the margins as predicted before climate change was named a “hoax” by a president who is — as I have repeated a dozen times, and will again — a sexual predator, jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist, socio-psychopathic psychopath, and ignorant war criminal, who lies constantly without thought to stay in the limelight every day.
What is the weather in Washington this summer and early fall? Temps over 100° degrees Fahrenheit, floods, storm damage, and tornadic winds.
And while suffering from the heat, Roberts kept pouring gasoline and diesel fuel on the fires burning up sections of the Civil Rights and Voting Acts he had been battling for decades, with emphasis on the Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013. The Voting Rights Act required most old Confederate states and some localities to obtain pre-clearance from the federal government if they had bad histories about obeying previous voting acts if they were thinking of changing voting laws in the jurisdiction. He claimed in his written opinion that these government units had addressed their problems with discrimination in voting and no longer had to get approval from Washington bureaucrats before changing laws.
But the effect of the change of laws in the court’s decision based on Roberts’s written opinion was immediate. Many of the nine states immediately changed district lines, tightened voter ID requirements, revised and purged voter rolls kept by states, cancelled same-day registration to make it more difficult because of distances or closed many voting precincts, making it more difficult for minority voters to get to the polls.
“Roberts’s jurisprudence on race often reverts to a simplistic notion of color blindness into taking race into account — no matter the reason — is itself racial discrimination,” Talbot said.
“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in 2006, dissenting from a majority opinion stating that a part of a Texas redistricting plan had violated the Voting Rights Act. In a 2007 case, Roberts, writing for the majority, struck down a Seattle school district’s program of assigning pupils to classrooms with a goal of racial diversity. He repeatedly cited Brown v. Board of Education, a case famously argued before the Court by Thurgood Marshall. In summary, Roberts claimed no one should tell anybody where children should go to school
What about overruling of lower courts? Only The Shadow knows!
As a news junkie, I have been following the actions of the Supreme Court since I was a senior in high school. As a Marine Corps officer, I had to cover Geneva Conventions and international treaty decisions about war, peace and the treatment of military and civilian personnel with my commands each year. As a teacher, elementary principal, high school principal, administrator
for personnel and school board member representing kindergarten kids through Ph.D. candidates, I had to know what was legal and constitutional. As a writer of a weekly column for 32 years, I had to know a lot of legal and illegal stuff.
Remember the old radio show of Orson Wells with the “Only The Shadow Knows” theme? It wasn’t about shadow documents dreamed up by Supreme Court members that offer no emergency explanations for the decisions made in very dark shadows that affect 345 million people.
Here’s a partial list of very important decisions made in the shadows: affirmative action, immigration, DACA, asylum, abortion, various voting laws, Second Amendment actions, gun rights, tariffs and armed conflicts. The Trump Administration opened its second chance by asking for action on 35 emergency requests on all kinds of policies on science, health, finance and the funding of hundreds of research programs.
The Roberts court has ruled in favor of Trump 25 times. The three liberals dissented on most of them. I pay attention to retired conservative Judge Michael Luttwig because he speaks common sense like Republicans used to speak decades ago. Talbot wrote in her article that Ludwig regarded the decision making Trump like a king in a democracy was “one of the two or three worst cases in all of American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage it did to the Constitution and the separation of powers.”
Roberts evidently has never read English poet John Donne’s line “No man is an island” on planet Earth — not even Trump who thinks he was appointed by God to rule. Remember when Roberts said judges were just like umpires calling balls and strikes on a baseball diamond? Major League Baseball just determined that ball and strike calls by umpires could be challenged by players. Calls can be overturned by computers and equipment covering home plate and even in calls made in the field of play.
