Will John Roberts Block the Triumph of Legal Conservatism?
Last year, as Americans prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving, John G. Roberts, the 17th chief justice of the United States, did something unprecedented in the history of the Supreme Court: He responded directly to a political attack by the president of the United States.
A couple of days before, a federal district judge in California had temporarily halted new regulations on applications for asylum by foreigners entering the United States. Judge Jon S. Tigar held that the restrictions contravened the actual requirements of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and thus could not go into effect.
“That’s not law,” President Donald Trump said of Tigar’s decision. “This was an Obama judge.”
Roberts had never shown any interest in taking a public part in America’s partisan wars; nonetheless, in a statement to Mark Sherman of the AP, Roberts contradicted Trump: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
[Read: John Roberts’s biggest test is yet to come]
Chief justices have often hated presidents, and vice versa. (The two Virginia cousins, Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, shared a flamboyant mutual detestation.) But both sides usually maintain a kind of clenched-teeth public politesse. Perhaps the closest thing to the Trump-Roberts exchange is a letter dated March 21, 1938, from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes to Senator Burton K. Wheeler in response to
