Roberts’s Court has wrought Trump’s Destruction

Forgotten in the arc of John Roberts’s nearly two decades as chief justice of the United States is his role, behind the scenes, to herald the result in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. No, he didn’t write the ruling that ushered in our current era of corporations and billionaires buying the presidency of the United States and other offices. But he can be credited with moving the chess pieces that made that sweeping landmark, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, possible.

One version of the story finds Roberts so spooked by an unpublished dissenting opinion by outgoing justice David Souter that the chief moved heaven and earth so that that document would never see the light of day. In it, Souter, a Republican and a big defender of campaign finance laws, called out Roberts for twisting the Supreme Court’s own internal rules to arrive at a far-reaching outcome in an otherwise small-bore dispute—in this case, a decree that the First Amendment places no limits on so-called “independent” corporate and union expenditures in our elections.

That’s not the legal question the Supreme Court had been asked to decide. And so other versions of this palace intrigue find Souter pleading with Roberts, and the rest of the court, to not overrule prior precedents curbing the influence of money in politics—and to rehear the case so that those precedents could get a second look and a fresh round of briefing and argument. Souter got his parting gift: On the final day before the Supreme Court broke for its summer break in June 2009, Roberts announced that the case would be reargued at a later hearing. Immediately thereafter, as his last order of business that day, the chief also announced “with sadness that this is the last session in which our friend and colleague, Justice David Souter, will be on the bench with us.” Problem solved. By the next January, Citizens United would become the law of the land.

One can only wonder what Roberts thinks of a duly elected chief executive and an unelected de facto prime minister leading the charge on mass firings across federal agencies, dismantling decades-old departments, and impounding appropriations that by definition are already the law. Roberts’s own branch of government is not exempt from DOGE’s intrusions; judges, law clerks, and court employees have all been put on high alert over the Trump administration’s documented encroachment even on day-to-day court operations.

These breaches of the separation of powers, both real and imagined, and the anti-constitutional monster spreading its tentacles across Washington, would’ve horrified the Founders. But that’s yet another consequence of unlimited wealth corrupting our politics. Democracy gives way to an oligarchy; that, in turn, may buy you a quasi-monarchy with few guardrails. Roberts and the other justices responsible for Citizens United may well believe that “independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” as they insisted at the time. The Trump-Musk reign of chaos has put that idea, fanciful then and now, to rest.

Fresh on the public’s mind is the Supreme Court’s indefensible immunity decision, which effectively shut down a criminal trial accusing Trump of masterminding his disruption of the transfer of power. Roberts’s florid language in that ruling makes it plain that he believes the president deserves special treatment as the head of one branch of government, beyond the reach of the casual cruelty that everyone else faces in the criminal system.

Yet the longer-term import of Trump v. United States, as longtime scholars of executive power have observed, may be how the Trump administration is embracing it today. In Trump’s hands, the ruling isn’t just a shield from prosecution; it’s a weapon to decimate the federal workforce, to dismantle agencies Republicans and business interests have long disliked, and to fire independent watchdogs and regulators Congress has seen fit to protect from White House interference.

Trump’s Washington is Roberts’s Washington. And the greatest feat of the Supreme Court that bears their names may yet be the wholesale destruction of government as we know it. In one executive order that garnered little attention, Trump directed his agencies on a “review-and-repeal” rampage to get rid of rules of governance that have long been on the books. The source for this directive? Ten cherry-picked decisions, all but one of them issued by Roberts’s majority or supermajority—covering everything from affirmative action policies to environmental law to religion in public life—that the administration thinks should carry the day. It’s too early to tell where this slash-and-burn campaign will end up. But if nearly 20 years of Roberts have taught us anything, it is that once he rules, the nation is left to figure out how to fix what he has broken. If it can be fixed at all.