In his December 31 Year End Report, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts announced his New Year’s resolution: to continue gaslighting the country by blaming everyone but himself for the dishonor he has allowed to fester in his Court. He did so in the guise of offering a righteous reading of the history of judicial independence in this country.
But a closer look at what Roberts wrote reveals the same tendency to cherry-pick history that characterizes many of his and his ideologically-aligned colleague’s judicial opinions. Changing the genre did not change this troubling tendency.
The ode to judicial independence that Roberts offers rings hollow, considering today’s scandal-ridden Court. Moreover, the Judicial Conference’s recent refusal to address the decades of alleged ethical lapses by Justice Clarence Thomas provides another reason why the judicial independence that Roberts reveres should not be a free pass to avoid accountability.
A review of the last several Year-End Reports by the Chief Justice reveals an effort to deflect attention from the Court’s own challenges and offer musings more appropriate for a bar journal article than an analysis from the highest judicial officer in the country. As Above the Law’s Joe Patrice notes, “For Chief Justice Roberts, the Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary is no longer a serious assessment of the state of the federal courts as much as it’s a taxpayer-funded blog post for him to express his disdain for the American people.”
History is the through-line within the Chief Justice’s once-a-year communication with the nation he serves. And it is the shroud that he uses to gloss over ethical challenges within the court system.
In 2021, Roberts’s history lesson recounted the efforts of Chief Justice William Howard Taft to create greater efficiency and collaboration among the nation’s federal judges through the establishment of a Conference of Senior Judges (the predecessor to today’s Judicial Conference of the United States). Roberts described the importance of Taft’s work as creating “the mechanisms of self-governance for federal courts across the country.”
He also highlighted subsequent congressional measures that “fortified the Judiciary’s institutional independence,” including empowering the “Judicial Conference and the Circuit Judicial Councils to respond to complaints of judicial misconduct.” He further noted that “Congress has continued to exercise oversight of the Judiciary’s operations, promoting a useful dialogue characterized by mutual respect in matters of administration.”
But the Chief managed to make his own words a mockery just two years later when he refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that was examining proposals to hold the Supreme Court to the same ethical standards as other federal judges. There too, he hid behind the notion of “preserving judicial independence” as his excuse for evading accountability.
His “nothing to see here” approach was also displayed in the part of his 2021 Report where he responded to a Wall Street Journal series about 131 federal court judges who failed to disclose their personal financial interest in matters before them. After a few dutiful words reinforcing the expectation that judges adhere to the highest standards, Roberts sought to “put these lapses in context” by adding his own interpretation of the violations.
He deemed most infractions “isolated violations” that “likely entailed unintentional oversights” as though he had personal knowledge of their motives. The Chief Justice assured the American public that “for all the conflicts identified, the Journal did not report that any affected the judge’s consideration of a case or that the judge’s actions in any of those cases…financially benefited the judge.”
These words offer a preview of how he can ignore the repeated allegations of unethical behaviors on his own Court.
Turning to 2022, the Chief’s Year-End Report recounted shameful efforts by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to prevent the integration of the State’s schools after Brown v. Board of Education earlier. But it ignored the disgraceful attempts by the states to avoid implementing the Supreme Court’s decision.
Instead, Roberts focused on a single judge, Ronald Davies, who ruled against the governor’s efforts to defy Brown. Amidst all the pain surrounding desegregation in Arkansas, Roberts lionized Davies, noting that he “missed his own son’s wedding to see through his charge to follow the law.”
Roberts highlighted the threats to Judge Davies that followed his decision in the Arkansas case and offered him as an example of the federal judicial officers “who quietly, diligently, and faithfully discharge their duties every day of the year.” That is the image Roberts frequently conjures to defend the federal judiciary, notwithstanding the partisan ideology espoused by his SCOTUS colleagues.
In his 2023 Report, the Chief Justice’s history lesson addressed technological advances in the court system and the future of AI in the court. He offered the obvious prediction that human judges will not be supplanted by advanced technology.
At the same time, he waxed nostalgic over the Clerk of the Supreme Court’s tradition of setting out white goose quill pens at the counsel table before every oral argument as “treasured souvenirs” for the lawyers. As other commentators reported, Roberts seemed more than a little out of touch with the world outside the Marble Palace.
But this year, he conveniently shifted the register away from quaint court practices and toward external threats that have now made Judge Davies’s experience an everyday occurrence.
He seemed to point fingers almost everywhere, including at public officials who “regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges—for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.” Yet he gave a pass to the public officials who engaged in dangerous intimidation tactics by allowing them to remain anonymous, and had nary a self-reflective glance at the Justices themselves to see how their behavior threatens the independence and integrity of the Court.
Instead, his reports are like shiny objects that urge the reader to look everywhere except at the Court’s scandalous upending of long-held precedents or at the Court’s overuse of the “Shadow Docket.” Look everywhere except at the Chief Justice’s own role as the author of the shocking and widely condemned decision conferring immunity from criminal prosecution on the presidency.
The Chief Justice wants his readers to focus on the dangers that arise from violence, intimidation, disinformation, and threats to defy lawfully entered judgments. Those dangers—both to individuals in the justice system and to the rule of law—always demand our condemnation.
But that condemnation cannot give the Chief Justice a free pass to gaslight the country by ignoring the hypocrisy in his Court’s opinions and avoiding responsibility for his own failure to enforce any ethical standards. The Chief’s pious and partial historical Year-End references to the value of judicial independence only serve to highlight the Court’s habit of culling selective history to reach preordained results.
Chief Justice Roberts can best protect judicial independence by restoring public confidence in the Court’s work, and by setting the highest example of ethics and accountability to serve as a model for judges throughout the federal court system.
