John Roberts, Stop Gaslighting America

Roberts Continues to Claim All Is Well While Americans and the World Witness the Wreckage of Trump’s Impunity

John Roberts continues to gaslight America, even as nearly every day we see the harmful consequences of his machinations to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity for his so-called “official acts.” Just last week, Roberts issued what has rightly been called a “feckless” report asserting that the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “remain firm and unshaken.”

I’d say such a claim could not be further from the truth, except that with each passing day, America slips further away from the truths our founding documents sought to uphold. Though on any given day the act may be committed by the president or one of his agents, none of this would be happening without Roberts illegitimately using judicial power to prevent Donald Trump from standing trial for the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Contrary to Roberts’ claim, our Constitution is not unshaken. It is, in fact, very shaken.

We need to understand that this crisis is not just Trump alone. MAGA Chief Justice Roberts struck out the central pillar protecting our liberty by manufacturing the notion that a president cannot be prosecuted for breaking the criminal laws of the United States through his actions as president.

In honor of the anniversary of January 6, I re-read Roberts’s counter-constitutional opinion on behalf of himself and his fellow Republican appointees. His outrageous declarations in that ruling grow more untenable with every passing day. His opinion–unhinged from the actual text of the Constitution, which commands that a president’s duty is to faithfully execute the law–repeatedly declares that a massive array of actions by Trump or any president are beyond the reach of our criminal laws.

According to Roberts’s invention, as long as Trump claims he is acting in his official capacity–which is what Trump and his lawyers claimed he was doing when he tried to overthrow the results of 2020 election and stop the Electoral College votes from being counted–he can face no criminal consequences. The limits on this immunity are scant.

Throughout that hyper-partisan opinion, Roberts asserts that Trump had and now has all sorts of powers that previous presidents and Congresses have rejected, such as the power to direct political prosecutions by the Justice Department. That practice has not been allowed in the U.S. since that crook Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the independent prosecutor investigating his crimes. Although Robert Bork did the deed, after the men above him at DOJ refused, since Watergate, every president–Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush (for at least part of the time), Barack Obama, and Joe Biden–abided by a set of rules to prevent the politicization of the awesome power of federal prosecution.

But not Trump. And Roberts’s foul opinion blesses the destruction of those boundaries by asserting that, of course, presidents can direct prosecutions. That’s exactly what Trump is doing now in his second term, with the help of handmaids like Pam Bondi and errand boys like Todd Blanche, whose previous private jobs were as personal lawyers defending Trump against the crimes and misdeeds he was accused of. Now, thanks to the Republicans in the Senate, his criminal defense lawyers are being paid by us to do his vengeful bidding.

It is genuinely disgusting to watch how these appointees have defiled the Justice Department. It was once an honor to me to share that I was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and had the honor of working at Main Justice, walking into the building each day under the engraving “The Place of Justice Is a Hallowed Place.” I used to say it was hallowed by the devotion of civil servants who set aside partisan politics and their religious beliefs to serve all of the American people, to advance justice. Not anymore.

Roberts, in essence, gave Trump advance permission to turn the Justice Department into his personal prosecution arm. Bondi’s appalling actions at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing late last year dripped with grotesque theatrical contempt for Democratic Senators engaged in legitimate oversight. She has similarly assailed “Democrat” prosecutors, injecting offensive partisan derision while wearing the title of Attorney General. In countless ways, she acts as though she shares Trump’s immunity.

And in some ways she does, again thanks to John Roberts. His gift of immunity when paired with the pardon power–which Roberts also sought to insulate beyond any review or check whatsoever–has created the very real, very dangerous scenario in which Trump can commit crimes and urge his minions to do the same with the implicit promise that he will pardon them. America has never faced such a threat to justice and the rule of law.

This is a recipe for disaster, for Americans and the world–an open invitation to the kinds of war crimes we have already seen, including the deadly attacks on drowning men whose boats were wrecked by our missiles off the coast of Venezuela. That same lawlessness is reflected in Trump’s unprecedented actions last week: ordering the seizure of the leader of Venezuela, claiming that the U.S. can simply take said country’s oil, and–as of this week’s Senate briefing–claiming a right to put any revenue into offshore bank accounts he would control, while cutting refining deals with U.S. oil companies. In other words, this is what Senator Chris Murphy called “an insane plan.”

And let’s not forget the ongoing onslaught of American communities by armed, masked, poorly trained Trump loyalists targeting immigrants and citizens with aggression. We have seen numerous acts of violence and profound disrespect that Trump and his minions have blessed as acceptable and even great, while disparaging any dissent.

The Roberts Court buttressed its immunity ruling by using the shadow docket last year to overturn 24 lower court orders trying to protect against Trump’s transgressions of the law, including efforts to limit the ways his masked agents have been deployed to swarm our communities and send immigrants to hellholes like CECOT.

It is sadly inevitable that some of the thugs recruited with outlandish $50K bounties will shoot and kill people, like what happened just yesterday in Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good was shot in cold-blood by a masked man wearing “federal police” insignia. Rather than condemn the act, Trump, his operatives, and his fan base immediately attacked the victim instead. This was yet another spit of fictional vomit spun by the same White House that has posted a false history of January 6, claiming that the violent insurrectionists Trump incited that day were “innocent” protestors.

Yet, John Roberts still has the audacity to use the mantle of his office to proclaim that the Constitution is “unshaken.”

This is shocking judicial gaslighting. It is rank and wrong. The United States and the world are being deeply shaken by Trump’s lawlessness.

That lawlessness is due in large part to Roberts effectively pardoning Trump, which helped sweep him back into the presidency, endowing him with even more power than he had before. One of the things that really stands out as especially jarring in Roberts’ immunity edict is his claim that the real threat to our constitutional system is a president who might behave cautiously due to fear of criminal prosecution… FOR. COMMITTING. CRIMES., crimes that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, as Jack Smith recently attested. That argument was rotten from the start, and it did not age well.

Roberts even claimed that what we should really fear is an “enfeebled” president who does not take “bold” action due to concern that he or she could be held accountable under our criminal laws–an absurd construct in the context then and worse now.

Even as he asserted that “no one is above the law,” Roberts placed Trump above the law in almost every meaningful way. Quite frankly, how dare he. Ultimately, we will need to see a real reckoning and correction of this destruction. This is not a mere policy dispute: it was a partisan political act that has wrecked our constitutional order.

Roberts knowingly orchestrated this ruling amid glaring conflicts of interest. He allowed Clarence Thomas to participate in the immunity case, despite his wife Ginni Thomas’s documented involvement in the fake elector scheme. And he accepted the vote of Sam Alito, whose wife had hoisted a symbol of January 6 over their home. The three Trump appointees–two occupying seats stolen from Democratic presidents–joined that ruling without any shame of the illegitimacy of them exonerating their benefactor. There was no judicial humility or restraint. The Roberts Court has shaken our very foundations.

Roberts has been gaslighting America from the outset. But to do so on New Year’s Eve after seeing the devastating consequences to American society and world order over the past eleven months is more than gaslighting. It is self-serving propaganda.

We absolutely have to reform the Court to restore our rights or Roberts and his faction will continue to redefine the rule of law to bless the lawlessness, injustice, and imperialism of the wannabe despot that we are bearing witness to every single day.

---

What I’m Reading:

• A virtual exhibit about the life of Crispus Attucks who was shot by British troops at the Boston Massacre.

  • This historical project was created with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts a few years ago: “Reflecting Attucks is a virtual exhibit that examines the memory of Crispus Attucks, a man of African & Native descent who was the first to die in the Boston Massacre, an event now regarded as the start of the American Revolution.”

• The introduction to my book–out loud–for the audio version of Without Precedent, which will be finalized this month and then widely available for those who prefer to listen to books on tape.

  • I am also working on travel to cities and towns across the country this winter and spring to talk about the book and the vital need to reform the Roberts Court.

• And, of course, the Constitution, with a particular focus on how we can reform the pardon power which surely cannot be absolute. For example, the First Amendment’s protection of free speech has been interpreted to allow suits for libel, to allow words of conspiracy to be used in criminal prosecutions–like some of the charges against Trump that Roberts blocked–and, of course, because everyone knows you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. Why should we tolerate the pardon power being abused by a president for his co-conspirators or other lawlessness by his minions? Of course we should not.

---

Support COURIER’s Journalism

Democracy dies behind a paywall, so our journalism is and will always be free to our readers.

But to be able to make that commitment, we need support from folks like you who believe in our mission and support our unique model.

---

Advertise in this newsletter

Do you or your company want to support COURIER’s mission and showcase your products or services to an aligned audience of 190,000+ subscribers at the same time? Contact advertising@couriernewsroom.com for more information.