John Roberts’ Obsession With SCOTUS Legitimacy Has Severely Delegitimized It

John Roberts’ Obsession With SCOTUS Legitimacy Has Severely Delegitimized It

BY: BEN WEINGARTEN for The Federalist 

Ending universal injunctions once and for all is the least the chief justice can do to defend not only the judiciary, but our country.

The chief irony of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure at the Supreme Court is that the man so doggedly devoted to defending the judiciary has done so much to undermine it. In so doing, he has threatened not only the court’s legitimacy but the republic itself.

His latest such act wasn’t an abomination of a ruling on the level of Obamacare, the census citizenship question, or DACA; a faulty probe into a devastating leak; or a defense of the indefensible censorship-industrial complex. It was a terse three-line statement that may prove the most consequential — and corrosive — move of them all.

“For more than two centuries,” the chief justice wrote, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

With that statement, the chief justice revealed not only that he suffers from the very self-aggrandizement plaguing the lower court judges but that he is either willfully blind to the brewing fire or lacks the will to put it out. Apparently, he is content to let it spread — digging in, defending courts acting lawlessly, and deferring to the “process.” At the same time, he attacks those who would dare notice the judiciary is self-immolating by subverting representative government and demand that something be done about it.

The chief justice’s statement came in direct response to a Truth Social post President Donald Trump published hours earlier. There, the president called for the impeachment of D.C. District Chief Judge James Boasberg — an unelected member of the federal judiciary, as Trump emphasized. Boasberg effectively usurped the president’s power and mandate to combat illegal immigration by thwarting his policy and micromanaging his operations to deport the terrorist illegal aliens of Tren de Aragua. 

Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, introducedarticles of impeachment against the judge for imperiling the nation, overstepping, and creating a “constitutional crisis” as the Trump-Roberts kerfuffle unfolded.

The self-aggrandizement lies in the chief justice’s apparent belief that he has the right and obligation to opine on the expressly political act of impeachment when that is a question for the legislative branch and ultimately the public it represents. What is absolutely “not an appropriate response” is to issue statements like his from the chambers of the Supreme Court — effectively seeking to interfere in the legislative branch’s deliberations.

Further, if you wanted to politicize the court and undermine the perception of its impartiality, what more could Chief Justice Roberts have done than to rebuke President Trump over his post? Moreover, Roberts did so after having previously attacked Trumpfor his 2018 comments about biased judges — while remaining silent as former President Biden flouted the court’s rulings; Biden and other Democrat leaders lambasted the Supreme Court and attacked its members; some called for their impeachment; and their followers threatened judges’ lives and courthouses with destruction.

To add insult to injury, Roberts showed animus toward a president who is party to litigation pending in lower courts almost assuredly ticketed for his own, and in fact, to litigation already sitting at the Supreme Court today — concerning the very dangerous judicial overreach to which the president’s post is referring.

The broader context here makes Roberts’ statement even more outrageous. Trump’s post alluded to “crooked” judges who have effectively colluded in unprecedented lawfare with the blue states, left-wing NGOs, and administrative state actors that have filed more than 100 lawsuitsaimed at paralyzing the president. The plaintiffs have proven partially successful by bringing those cases to courts (like that of Boasberg’s D.C. District) populated with Democrat nominees who have prohibited the administration from implementing its agenda at mass scale and with reckless abandon.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller put it well, noting that district court judges have “assumed the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security and Commander-in-Chief,” while dictating “the foreign policy, economic, staffing and national security policies of the Administration.”

The executive’s effort to reassert control over the executive branch — home of the unelected and unaccountable administrative state saboteurs of the Trump I agenda — and ensure it helps him fulfill the Trump II mandate, has now resulted in the unelected and unaccountable members of the judiciary resisting. There’s your assault on democracy, not to mention the republic.

Collectively in these cases, we have witnessed judges arguably rule on nonjusticiable issues, impose improper remedies, and ignore Supreme Court precedent — at times on behalf of plaintiffs arguably lacking in standing, with the judges themselves sometimes lacking in jurisdiction.

Most egregiously, as I recently reported at RealClearInvestigations, they have done so via universal injunctions issued at historic speed, scale, and of maximum potency.

This is a novel remedy, neither called for in the Constitution nor arguably in federal law, that exploded in usage under the first Trump administration. It faced nearly two-thirds of all injunctions issued this century, 92 percent of which were handed down by Democrat-nominated judges. Then, despite the urgings of Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues refused to rule on their legitimacy.

As a consequence of the court’s lack of urgency, in the single month of February 2025 alone, federal judges issued more universal injunctions against the Trump administration than they did during the first three years of the Biden administration.

The Trump administration noted in a recent court filing that federal judges “have issued not just universal injunctions, but universal TROs,” generally unappealable orders at times granted without even giving the administration a hearing.

“They have run their writ not just nationwide, but worldwide,” the administration added, “And they have awarded not just universal injunctive relief, but de facto universal damages.”

This was a reference in part to the freeze of the administration’s foreign aid pause and the demand that it pay out $2 billion in funds allegedly owed to non-parties to the case all over the world pursuant to a universal TRO issued by D.C. District Judge Amir Ali. The Supreme Court refused to rule on that order, drawing the ire of Justice Alito, who issued a scathing dissent joined by Thomas, Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — but not Roberts.

As the rulings get more and more absurd in nature and reach, and as the ability of the administration to fulfill its basic constitutional duties becomes ever more imperiled, Roberts’ call for following “the normal appellate review process” — which the administration has done — is beyond alarming.

His unwillingness to rein in the lower courts is precisely why, as I further reported, members of Congress are mobilizing to halt universal injunctions by law and now to a lesser extent calling for impeaching judges. The chief justice’s willingness to let the lower courts that Congress created engage in such injustice has compelled the legislative branch to act.

That his inclination is evidently to defend the judges burning down the judiciary — and, to use another metaphor, to let cases sufficiently ripen while the entire institution rots — is remarkable.

Chief Justice Roberts self-evidently believes that the courts’ critics are a bigger problem than the lawless judges who have garnered such richly deserved criticism.

His statement is also an invitation for lower court judges to act and rule ever more brazenly. After all, the most they have to fear for egregiously political rulings is being smacked down in the “normal appellate review process.”

In near identical cases before the Supreme Court right now, the Trump administration has called for a stay of several universal injunctions upending its executive order curbing birthright citizenship. It has also called for the Supreme Court to “declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”

Ruling rightly on this fundamental issue by ending universal injunctions once and for all is the least the chief justice can do to defend not only the judiciary, but our country.