Gregg Gonsalves
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"J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly. 'The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,' Luttig told the Guardian."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21/justice-john-roberts-supreme-court

The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America
The chief justice of the US has painted himself as a modern institutionalist over the past 20 years. Experts say he’s emboldening Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism
www.theguardian.com
August 21, 2025 at 6:54 PM

US supreme court
The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America


Illustration: Guardian Design/Tom Williams/Getty Images

The chief justice of the US has painted himself as a modern institutionalist over the past 20 years. Experts say he’s emboldening Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism

Ed Pilkington
Thu 21 Aug 2025 08.00 EDT

In the past 10 weeks America has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of decisions from its highest court that should make Trump very happy indeed. The six rightwing justices who control the court – three of them given their lifetime seats by Trump himself – have effectively greenlighted the president’s explosive and law-busting agenda.

The supermajority has granted Trump 18 straight victories in the administration’s requests for emergency relief. Steve Vladeck, a leading supreme court scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, has tracked the decisions in his Substack, One First, noting that the rulings have been handed down largely in the legal darkness.


Donald Trump gestures John Roberts after he was sworn in during inauguration ceremonies in the rotunda of the US Capitol on 20 January in Washington DC. Photograph: Guardian Design/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

They have been piped through the court’s so-called “shadow docket”, where important affairs of state are decided at speed and with little or no debate or deliberation. By Vladeck’s count, seven of the orders have been issued without any explanation, leaving the American people clueless as to the justices’ thinking.

Yet the emergency rulings, though temporary in nature, could have seismic consequences. For as long as they hold they have the potential to cause untold suffering to millions of people targeted by Trump.

That includes countless federal employees who can now be fired at whim after decades of loyal public service; transgender people purged from the military; more than 1 million individuals from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and other countries who are being stripped of their status to remain in the US; immigrants singled out for deportation to war-torn third countries where their lives are in danger.

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