Imagine: you are at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening?
Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy. But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.
Trump needed Roberts to win—and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way. In a matter of months, the court’s 6–3 GOP-aligned majority has permitted a long list of lawless actions, including firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse. But the court’s acquiescence to an antidemocratic America didn’t start in 2025. Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.
“You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy,” says Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system.
Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.
In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.
Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires. His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not “lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.
The chief justice didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents—he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team. In 2004, as a DC appeals court judge, he landed on a panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s attempt to circumvent both the Geneva Conventions and the US justice system’s protections to try enemy combatants in military tribunals. As he considered the case, Roberts attended a series of secret meetings with top administration officials about joining the Supreme Court. Rather than recuse, and in violation of a federal conflict of interest law, Roberts signed on to a sweeping victory for Bush the same week his nomination was made official—a decision that endorsed vast new executive powers. His opinion went too far for his future colleagues on the Supreme Court, who soon struck it down. But it wouldn’t be the last time Roberts made such a bargain with the leader of his party.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way.
Nor was it out of character. When Reagan entered the White House, Democrats controlled the House, and Roberts pitched in on Justice Department efforts to increase the president’s powers by cooking up the unitary executive theory—the idea that a president has absolute authority over the entire executive branch. Once he reached the high court, Roberts began to write the theory into law, usually by expanding the president’s power to fire officials Congress vested with independence. But even with the Roberts court’s increasingly radical record—from its elimination of the right to reproductive choice to allowing businesses to deny services to LGBTQ clients—many legal analysts argued that Roberts would draw the line at saying the Constitution protected presidents from criminal liability. As Trump’s lawyer conceded in a lower court, such a ruling would mean a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival with impunity. But the assertions that the Roberts court wouldn’t go so far as to give the president the power of a king proved to be wishful thinking. On July 1, 2024, Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States granted presidents criminal immunity for official acts. Legal scholars were aghast. But University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq notes that the decision is the capstone to a chain of Roberts’ opinions endorsing the unitary executive theory, thereby granting “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.”
Upon regaining office in January 2025, Trump immediately put this to the test, firing inspectors general, dismantling agencies created by Congress, withholding spending appropriated by Congress, removing regulators protected by Congress, and defying numerous other laws. As if to underline his lawyer’s courtroom admission on assassination, Trump has had boatloads of civilians killed over his baseless accusations that they were trafficking narcotics.
We are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president. “By creating out of whole cloth this ‘presidents can commit crimes with immunity’ doctrine that is anathema to the Constitution and rule of law, the Roberts court validated Trump’s view of himself as above the law, beholden to no one,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, which advocates for adding justices to alter the court’s makeup.
Long before Roberts and his colleagues assented to Trump’s lawless second term, they helped him get one. Not since 2000, when the justices put George W. Bush in the White House, has the court done so much to pick a president. In March 2024, the court overruled Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off its ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars oath-breaking insurrectionists from office. Given that Trump had sicced an armed mob on the US Capitol, Colorado’s Supreme Court found that he fit the bill, but the justices disagreed that the state could remove his name. In an unsigned decision, five conservative justices invented new law by saying only Congress could enforce Section 3, and only in the specific way the court dictated. Meanwhile, as special counsel Jack Smith waited to move Trump’s election interference case forward that spring, the court delayed reaching a decision on presidential immunity that could have allowed a trial. When it did, four months after the Colorado ruling, Roberts’ opinion instead effectively halted the prosecution. That November, Trump won.
By then, the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law. These unexplained rulings have befuddled judges charged with applying the high court’s precedent. That’s because Roberts has totally replaced the rule of law with partisan loyalty—for example, ruling that ICE can consider race when seizing people off the street while colleges can’t when admitting students, which is consistent only insofar as both outcomes are supported by Republicans, or letting Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress in defiance of the legislature’s spending power. In the birthright citizenship case, the 6–3 majority used the shadow docket not only to overrule lower courts’ orders blocking an obviously unconstitutional policy, but to more broadly strip them of authority to fully stop any lawless president—rigging the underlying system of checks and balances to help Trump.
“This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic.”
Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts. The court’s increasing radicalism had been fueling a movement for reform by adding justices or enacting term limits. The court had also spent the past year under an ethical cloud, beginning with the revelation that Justice Clarence Thomas had secretly taken millions of dollars in gifts, vacations, and loans from a handful of billionaires with interests before the court. Thomas also refused to recuse himself from January 6–related cases, even though his wife had fought to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Justice Samuel Alito also didn’t recuse, despite flying flags outside his homes that valorized Trump’s failed coup. Congress was demanding answers, and calls for an enforceable ethics code were growing. Moreover, Thomas and Alito were in their mid-70s, raising the odds that if Trump lost, the court could flip to a liberal majority. So Roberts did what he had done for Bush in 2005—he gave the president broad new powers, and in so doing secured them for himself.
His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation. “The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP,” Doerfler says. As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast. “It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” Doerfler says. Beyond likely finishing off the VRA this term, the court is weighing one of the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule.
At this point, the court is in a love triangle with Republicans and billionaires, facilitating a jurisprudence that subordinates workers’ rights and responsive democracy to the whims of the ultra-rich. Beyond Thomas, Alito, too, has accepted private trips from Republican billionaires and recently began hobnobbing with a right-wing German princess. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both from well-off families, enjoy summer jaunts in Europe paid for by the same billionaires who bankroll the conservative legal movement and its Supreme Court recruitment process. Roberts appears to have avoided such overtly compromising relationships, but he hasn’t needed them, with his wife bringing in millions as a legal recruiter for top law firms, including some that have argued cases before her husband.
The ethics scandals could explain some of Roberts’ and his colleagues’ recent decisions, like how they’ve consistently torn down public corruption law on the premise that bribery is just a part of politics. “The eager embrace and encouragement that you’ve seen from the Roberts court for Trump’s lawlessness is just marinating in the right-wing justices’ belief that rules don’t apply to them either,” Lipton-Lubet says. “Justices who are comfortable taking essentially undisclosed bribes from fellow ideologues end up deciding that the president they support is above the law. They’ve created this culture for themselves of accountability-free corruption, and that extends, I think, to the way that they view the administration.” She adds, “You can only live in a rule-free environment for so long before it cooks your brain.”
The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.
In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.
Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.
Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.