By Amy Clark
Guest Columnist
Many Americans are confused by recent rulings of the Supreme Court. An article, published in the Aug. 17 edition of the New York Times magazine, by Margaret Talbot, titled, “The Delusions of John Roberts,” helped me make more sense of them.
Retired federal judge, J. Michael Luttig, declared, “The 2024 Trump v. United States ruling that granted presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts is one of the two or three worst Supreme Court’s verdicts in all of American history because of the structural damage it did to the constitution and the separation of powers.”
I wonder what he means by this ruling ‘damaging’ our Constitution? The Court’s role is to rule on the constitutionality of the cases they choose to address. Is Luttig accusing the majority of the Justices of delivering a positive opinion of something unconstitutional? Is he insisting they relinquished their responsibility to protect us from unconstitutional laws and failed to safeguard our rights established by it, in their ruling?
Chief Justice John Roberts has succeeded in accomplishing much of President Trump’s second-term agenda by convincing his fellow Supreme Court Justices to join him in overruling lower courts’ verdicts.
As the most influential among the justices,”Roberts promotes the ‘Unitary-Executive Theory” that calls for the enlargement of presidential power. In 1983, he proposed congress reconsider the Constitutional requirement of independent government agencies and urged legislators to “bring them back within the executive branch.”
The Unitary-Executive Theory states, “The President has the sole power to appoint, direct and fire high-level federal officers.”
In 2020, Roberts wrote, “President Trump could fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without cause.”
During his second term, Talbot explains, “Trump has taken the Supreme Court’s rulings on executive power as a license to obliterate entire departments, gut the federal workforce, fire officials at independent agencies designed to be insulated from political pressure, and use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm and police force.”
“Roberts pushed for the rollback of Affirmative Action and of voting-rights protections for minorities, which he thinks our society no longer needs,” Talbot states.
Former Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wisely said, “Throwing the Voting Rights Act out when it is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet while you are using it.”
What has been the result? Retired federal judge David Tatel wrote, “States re-drew district lines, tightened voter-ID requirements, purged voter rolls, canceled same day registration, restricted early voting, and closed polling places—in ways that made voting more difficult for minority voters than others.”
“Many of the Supreme Court’s decisions have been issued on the emergency, or ‘shadow’ docket—decided without a full briefing, oral arguments (pro and con) or detailed, considered opinions,” Talbot revealed.
In 2018, Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota, “You get as many people on board as you can by keeping decisions narrow, and by only deciding on what is absolutely necessary to be decided. Though the final rulings certainly matter, of equal importance is the Court’s choice of which cases to take up in the first case.”
In this regard, I believe Roberts keeps his finger on Lady Justice’s scale and uses his significant ability to determine the selection.
Talbot states, “The Trump Administration is constantly filing for ‘emergency relief’ to vanquish lower-court rulings that impede its policies, even constitutional matters, from immigration to election law.”
Dissenting Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, delivering a speech at Yale University complained about the Court’s current dependence on the emergency docket, “A president, in a real emergency application to the Court, might argue that they were being irreparably harmed by a lower court’s ruling against one of their executive orders, but that hardly matters if what they want to do is illegal.” Justice Jackson insisted, “Shadow docket petitions pour in year-round—including in July and August, months when the Justices once had little if any business to attend to.”
Talbot comments, “Roberts acted as a ‘bulldozer’ behind the scenes of the 2026 shadow docket ruling that blocked the Clean Power Plan, which would have required U.S. electric companies to reduce carbon emissions by a third within 15 years.” Pressuring the other Justices, he declared those companies were receiving “on-going, cumulative irreversible harms,” as a result of the plan, urging them to ignore the same to the earth’s environment.
“To issue important decisions in such a cursory manner disrespects not only the people whose lives are upended by those rulings but also the American public.” Talbot reported. “Of the 35 requests for emergency action made by the Trump Administration—on everything from de-funding scientific research to allowing people to be deported to ‘third countries’ where they have no affiliations—the court has ruled in the Administration’s favor, in part or in full, 25 times.”
I want to know why these consequential matters presented as such an emergency that time is not allotted for full deliberation involving traditional operating methods utilized by former Justices in the past. “It hinders engagement and mutual understanding,” Talbot warns. I agree. I view this type of action as a red flag indicating something is wrong.
Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism noted, “Bureaucratic despotism hollows out legislatures: parliaments cease making laws, and executives rule by decree. Inflation, and unemployment leave people uprooted, isolated, and possessed by a pervasive hatred of the existing state of their society. A movement organizes their discontent, offering fictitious explanations to unresolved problems. At its center stands an infallible leader: his words cannot be questioned, and his lies are turned into a functioning reality. He and his cadre insult and dehumanize outsiders, who are then stripped of their rights, rendered stateless, and herded into internment camps. By continually altering reality, a government can disable the faculties of judgment and action on which political freedom depends.”
In the opinion of Pomona University professor, Amanda Hollis-Brusky, “The US effectively has a monarch, because our government’s executive branch engages in military conflicts without consulting Congress or even reporting to it.”
