Just over 20 years ago, John Roberts was sworn in as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In those two decades, Roberts has blithely overseen the near-total dismantling of American democracy and an unprecedented rollback of basic rights. At virtually every opportunity, the Roberts Court has aggrandized its own power and that of the Republican Party that it reliably serves while exacerbating our social, economic and political divisions.
Roberts himself has been in the majority for nearly all of his Court’s worst decisions, and it is therefore no exaggeration to lay the ongoing catastrophe of our rolling national crisis at his feet. He will go down in history alongside unambiguous villains like Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Melville Weston Fuller, who oversaw the court that drafted Plessy v. Ferguson. For future generations, the name “John Roberts” will be indelibly linked to the unraveling of American democracy and the descent of our country into a period of madness and instability.
Almost from the get-go, the Roberts Court has issued decisions that have degraded American democracy. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled in a 5-4 decision to remove any meaningful corporate spending limits in American elections. This grotesque miscarriage of justice is almost solely responsible for the influence that billionaires and shadowy Super PACs have exerted on the last three presidential elections, turning our politics into a plaything for the wealthiest Americans. And then in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court, again in a 5-4 decision, invalidated section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a flood of electoral manipulation across the former Jim Crow South.
Partisan gerrymandering is not new, but it is one of the worst scourges of American democracy. It allows self-interested politicians to pick their voters by drawing district lines to their partisan advantage. The Court finally had an opportunity to outlaw this unpopular, destructive practice and instead kicked the can back to Congress and the states in Rucho v. Common Cause. The grave consequence of that refusal to address one of our democracy’s most serious flaws is the current flurry of mid-decade redistricting bills making their way through red states, which are unapologetically designed to undemocratically insulate the GOP’s House majority from an incoming midterm backlash.
But perhaps the gravest blow to American democracy was delivered in 2024’s Trump v. United States, when the Court ruled, in an opinion drafted by Roberts himself, that presidents enjoy “presumptive immunity” for nearly all their “official acts.” The ruling halted multiple ongoing prosecutions of then-former president Donald Trump, who unsurprisingly interpreted it as a green light to engage in virtually unlimited corruption and lawbreaking when he was reelected president in 2024. The situation is now so bad that nominees to the federal bench cannot say whether it is even illegal for the president to order the assassination of political enemies. This nightmare situation is John Roberts’ doing. He owns every single instance of Trump’s lawlessness.
As John Roberts and his friends were gutting American democracy, they were also rolling back rights that generations of Americans took for granted. Of course, the most well known is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped women of their fundamental reproductive autonomy. But the Court has also rolled back rights for trans citizens in United States v. Skrmetti, which held that states can ban gender-affirming care for minors.
In Trump v. Hawaii, the Court acceded to the first Trump administration’s blatant discrimination against Muslims by allowing the president to ban nationals from certain countries from entering the United States. And it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court will do with Trump’s blatantly illegal decision to eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order. After all, the Court just last month functionally set aside the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures by ruling in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that ICE can detain people for nothing other than speaking Spanish or standing in a Home Depot parking lot. This insane ruling would have been unthinkable even five years ago. But here we are.
It would take a novel to fully document the catastrophic impact of the Roberts Court on our democracy and society. But the big picture is clear—the only rights that have been expanded over the past 20 years are those of gun fetishists, lawless presidents, and grotesquely rich people who want even more control over our society than they already have. Ordinary Americans, as a direct consequence of John Roberts’ extremist ideology, inept leadership, and cowardly subservience to President Trump, live under a political regime that is substantially less democratic and free than it was at the turn of the century.
When they regain power, Democrats must make ending the Roberts Court their number-one priority. That means expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court or stripping it of jurisdiction over certain matters of democracy and liberty until the damage that John Roberts has wrought has been undone. The sooner he and his horrific Supreme Court are relegated to a shameful footnote in American history, the better.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris and Bluesky @davidfaris.bsky.social.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.