John Roberts has become the worst modern Supreme Court chief justice | Opinion

With each passing week, Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican-friendly colleagues bestow never-before-enjoyed authorities upon the Trump Administration. The plan seems to be — if we grant the president everything he dreams of, maybe he’ll leave the high court unmolested. The republic may fall but we’ll still have the cool robes and life tenure. John Roberts is becoming the Neville Chamberlain of post-democratic government in America.

Recent steps by the Supreme Court have allowed the executive branch to decimate the Department of Education, summarily fire tens of thousands of other civil servants, permit “third country removals” to notoriously dangerous nations despite demonstrated likelihood of torture, let the Department of Defense brutally dismiss even highly decorated transgender soldiers and sailors based on orders of overt bigotry, terminated legally-assured protections for massive numbers of migrants from war-torn countries and limited the essential reach of federal court decrees against the executive branch — frequently under summary and temporary orders with scant or non-existent justification. Each would have likely been illegal before Donald Trump became president. Now they’re apparently fine.

And the Court seems to have invalidated, after nearly a century of ready and repeated judicial embrace, the notion of independent federal agencies as well. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices just blocked a federal district court ruling preventing Trump from firing, contrary to statutory mandate, three of the five members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The landmark 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. was cast aside. No limitations on presidential discretion are now to be tolerated — no matter how much sense it may make to remove certain types of administrative decision-making from the sway of politics. All power to Trump, regardless of the claims of text and history. You demand it, Mr. President, we deliver, even if on the down low. Just spare us your wrath. We don’t even mind if you violate our decrees. Just lie when you do it. Easy enough.

All this begins, existentially, with Trump v. United States, where Roberts determined — despite the clear text of the Constitution, the bold declarations of the framers, over two centuries of judicial precedent, and the obvious contemporaneous understandings of every American president — that Donald Trump is beyond the reach of the criminal law. That we are no longer a government of laws. The axiom had a great run. But 235 years is enough. As Trump puts it: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Ungrammatical perhaps, but he got the gist of it.

What amazes me most about Roberts’ judicial leadership is that, even after having had it proven to him, undeniably, that his positions are disastrously untenable, he embraces them in a limp cling to power. Don’t believe your lying eyes, they seem to say. Trump summoned and instigated a violent attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. The bloody tirade occurred just down the street from the Court itself. It was on TV. But Roberts concluded the constitution had to bend to Trump instead of the other way around. That since we have a criminal seditionist as president, the legal system must be altered to accommodate the criminality. What worked for centuries will no longer do.

Then Trump and Elon Musk demonstrated to the world the horrors of an unconstrained presidency — of a truly un-cabined “unitary executive.” As if those words could meaningfully define the permissible ins and outs of a massive modern administrative state not contemplated by the framers. Trump and Musk delivered a chain-saw laden regime of cruelty that stunned, still stuns, the American people. Between those outrages and ICE’s constant thuggism, we are treated to a government that literally sickens our stomachs. So Roberts steps in, ditching Humphrey’s Executor, to make sure Trump’s discretion is additionally liberated. Really? Just because you’re scared of him?

It’s reasonable to wonder whether the rule of law can survive this. As John Roberts works to become our worst modern chief justice, will he also effectively become our last?

Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

This story was originally published July 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "John Roberts has become the worst modern Supreme Court chief justice | Opinion."