John Roberts wins his MAGA bet

The last time Democrats had any serendipity with respect to the Supreme Court was when David Souter turned into a fairly orthodox liberal after a year of voting like Anthony Kennedy. Since then, Republicans have gotten every break — William Rehnquist not retiring at death’s door but the dice landing for Bush in Ohio, Trump winning against almost everyone’s expectations after Mitch McConnell refused to consider the oldest and most moderate Supreme Court nominee he could have gotten from a Democratic president, RBG being both foolish and (cf. Rehnquist) unlucky.

After one last failed bit of attempted pragmatic “statesmanship” in Dobbs, John Roberts has gone full MAGA, culminating in the outrageous Trump v. Hawaii. And once again, it couldn’t have worked out any better for him — the Court is both more powerful and more partisan than ever and practically untouchable for the rest of Roberts’s lifetime:

You have to hand it to John Roberts: The chief justice played his cards right. For more than a year now, Roberts has largely dropped his pose as an institutionalist, let alone a moderate. He has instead thrown his weight behind Donald Trump, reestablishing his control over the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. These apparent acts of self-preservation, seemingly undertaken in anticipation of a second Trump term, turned out to be the smart bet. It’s easy to imagine an earlier version of the chief justice spending the next four years losing his grasp on the court’s direction and drawing Trump’s public ire. Today’s iteration of John Roberts need not fear this fate. His position of appeasement, if not outright capitulation, to a MAGA vision of the law is about to pay off in spades.

To see how much the chief justice has changed, remember the role he played in Trump’s first term: the uneasy guardrail against some of the president’s most extreme policies and grievances. After Trump condemned an “Obama judge” for ruling against his administration in 2018, Roberts issued a rare public rebuke, scolding the president for besmirching the “independent judiciary.” (Trump fired back over Twitter, keen to seize the last word.) In 2019, Roberts cast the decisive vote to block a citizenship question on the census, correctly accusing the administration of misrepresenting its reasoning for adding one and then shabbily trying to cover its tracks. In 2020, he once again cast the key vote to halt Trump’s rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program protecting Dreamers from deportation. That year, he also voted to protect LGBTQ+ people under civil rights law, impeding the administration’s anti-trans agenda.

During this period, Roberts was still delivering significant victories to the conservative legal movement. But there was a limit to his tolerance for big swings, especially those that reflected poor lawyering by unscrupulous Trump loyalists. SCOTUS was divided 5–4 along ideological lines, and Roberts sat at its center, allowing him to guide a majority back toward the middle to reject some MAGA excesses. After Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in late 2020, however, she shored up a new ultraconservative majority that left Roberts in the dust on hot-button issues over the next two years. This five-justice bloc weakened COVID restrictions to promote “religious liberty.” It abused the shadow docket to revive Trump-era regulations. Most infamously, it fully abolished the constitutional right to abortion. All as Roberts stood on the sidelines, pleading for compromises that his hard-right colleagues spurned. As recently as 2022, it felt as if the chief justice was losing control of the court that he nominally led.

The lesson Roberts took from this losing streak was simple: If you can’t beat them, join them—and if you join them, you might as well take the reins. Trump’s steady return to power in 2023 and 2024 coincided with the chief justice going full MAGA. When the five other conservatives held together, Roberts joined them every time, refusing to be sidelined with the liberals. And, most revealingly, the chief justice powered the court toward huge victories for the former president in a trio of cases that helped pave the way for his comeback.

You sometimes hear people respond to claims that an election was critically important with “but you said that last time!” Well, yes, I hate to tell you. 2014 and 2016 are elections with disastrous consequences that we’re going to be living with for decades.