The Roberts' Court

 

October 6 is the first Monday of the month. It is the traditional start of the U.S. Supreme Court term. It is also the twentieth year with John Roberts as Chief Justice. While American democracy faces many challenges—economic inequality, racial divisions, and rampant polarization—another corrosive force too often overlooked sits at the very top of the judicial hierarchy. The Roberts Court may be the most aggressively anti-democratic Supreme Court in U.S. history.

By design the Court is inherently insulated from democracy. Justices are unelected, serve for life, and wield the power to strike down laws passed by elected representatives. The Constitution envisions this insulation as a safeguard: the Court should resist majoritarian pressures and protect vulnerable minorities. 

In United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 US. 144 (1938), the famous footnote four laid out this vision of the judiciary as the guardian of political participation, tasked with keeping the channels of democratic change open. However, under Roberts, the Court has abandoned this role. Instead of defending democracy, the Court has shut doors, tilted the playing field, and entrench power in the hands of the wealthy, white, and well-connected.

Consider the record. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law. The state could not point to a single example of the voter fraud it claimed to be preventing. What the law did was burden poor, elderly, and minority voters—those least likely to have government-issued identification. With this decision, the Roberts Court put its seal of approval on voter suppression, encouraging states to pass laws that systematically exclude inconvenient voters. Far from protecting the right to vote, the Court became an accomplice in undermining it.

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), was a body blow to voting rights. The Court gutted the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most effective civil rights tools in American history. Roberts claimed the formula was outdated, ignoring the ongoing evidence of racial discrimination in voting. Within hours, states rolled out new restrictions: voter ID laws, polling place closures, and voter purges. The Court unleashed a wave of suppression that disproportionately targeted minority communities. This was not colorblind constitutionalism; it was willful blindness to racism in the political system.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), continued the demolition of the Voting Rights Act. By upholding Arizona’s restrictive voting laws and adopting a narrow test for discrimination claims, the Court all but neutered Section 2 of the Act. Even laws with obvious racial disparities now stand a better chance of surviving. Roberts and his majority did not just interpret the statute narrowly; they rewrote its purpose, leaving voters of color with diminished protection.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), the Roberts Court struck down restrictions on corporate and union spending in elections. By equating money with speech, the Court created a plutocrat’s playground. Elections became less about ideas and more about dollars. Super PACs, dark money groups, and billionaires now dominate the airwaves, drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. This was not judicial restraint; it was judicial activism of the worst kind—an activist Court rewriting the rules of democracy to empower corporations and the wealthy few.

The attack continued in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U.S. 721 (2011). Roberts himself wrote the opinion striking down Arizona’s system of matching funds for publicly financed candidates. This was a program designed to reduce corruption and give ordinary citizens a fair shot against entrenched money. By invalidating it, the Court told states they could not even experiment with reforms to clean up politics. The message was unmistakable: the Roberts Court is not a neutral umpire but a battering ram against any effort to curb the power of money in politics.

Meanwhile, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014), doubled down on the assault on campaign finance. By striking down aggregate contribution limits, the Court opened another pipeline for the wealthy to buy influence. Combined with Citizens United, the result is an electoral system increasingly controlled by the donor class. For Roberts and his colleagues, the problem was not that money distorts democracy, but that wealthy donors weren’t free enough to spend more.

The Court then washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019). By declaring the issue nonjusticiable, the Court effectively gave politicians a green light to draw maps that lock in their own power such as they are doing in Texas and other states. Gerrymanders now allow minority parties to dominate legislatures and insulate themselves from electoral accountability. Roberts’s claim that courts lack a standard to judge gerrymandering was disingenuous. Standards had been proposed; the Court simply lacked the will. By abdicating, it entrenched minority rule and undermined representative democracy.

In Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 591 U.S. ___, 140 S. Ct. 2019 (2020), the Court weakened Congress’s ability to investigate the president. Oversight is a cornerstone of checks and balances, yet the Roberts Court imposed a burdensome test that made it far harder to obtain crucial information. In effect, it shielded presidential misconduct from scrutiny, tilting power further toward the executive.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), the Court toppled Chevron deference, stripping federal agencies of their ability to reasonably interpret ambiguous statutes. This was a long-standing conservative goal, and Roberts delivered. The decision shifts policymaking away from agencies answerable to elected officials and hands it to unelected judges. The result is paralysis in regulation and a judiciary empowered to thwart democratic governance in environmental protection, labor standards, and consumer rights.

Perhaps most alarming, Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), granted sweeping presidential immunity for “official acts.” This decision elevates the president above the law, a status the Constitution never contemplated. If the president cannot be held criminally accountable for abusing power, democracy itself is at risk. By insulating the office from accountability, Roberts and his Court invited authoritarianism.

Finally, Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. ___ (2025), curtailed federal courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. In the context of an executive order limiting birthright citizenship, the Court limited remedies to only the named plaintiffs. The broader public, even if equally harmed, received no immediate protection. This ruling stripped the judiciary of one of its most effective tools for checking executive overreach, making it harder to stop unconstitutional actions before they spread nationwide.

The pattern is unmistakable. The Roberts Court has dismantled campaign finance protections, gutted voting rights, legitimized gerrymandering, weakened congressional oversight, kneecapped the administrative state, and placed the president above the law. Far from defending democracy, it has been one of its most consistent adversaries. Every chance the Roberts Court has had to come to the aid of democracy and limiting abuses of power, it has turned away.

This is not judicial modesty. This is not principled restraint. It is a project: to entrench minority rule, empower moneyed interests, and protect executive power from accountability. John Roberts, who once sold himself as an umpire calling balls and strikes, has instead led a team of partisan players rewriting the rulebook of American democracy to favor the wealthy, the powerful, and the entrenched.

As the Court begins its twenty-first year under Roberts’s leadership, the outlook is grim. Those who once hoped the Supreme Court would serve as the final firewall against authoritarianism must confront the reality that the Roberts Court has been an accelerant of democratic decline. God help this honorable Court and American Democracy—because under John Roberts, it has done little to help democracy itself.

David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University. He is the author of Presidential Swing States:  Why Only Ten Matter.  -CounterPunch