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John Roberts Makes His Bid for Infamy

The New York Times / Jamella Bouie

  • July 12, 2024

NYT Opinion Column by Jamella Bouie. The most important takeaway from the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States is that Chief Justice John Roberts, with the approval of his Republican colleagues, rewrote the Constitution to place the president above the law.

The chief justice erased the Constitution’s clear contemplation of criminal charges for presidential misconduct. He conjured, out of thin air, a distinction between “official” and “unofficial” acts that can’t survive the slightest scrutiny. He cloaked the executive in a prosecutorial immunity so complete that it shields almost any act a president might take from legal accountability as long as that president could tie it to a “core” duty. He eliminated, in practice, any distinction between a lawful or unlawful exercise of presidential authority. And Roberts did this, he says, to preserve the separation of powers and the integrity of the executive branch.

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What stands out in Dred Scott is the breadth of Taney’s opinion. Rather than deal with the narrow question of Scott’s freedom, Taney reached out beyond the scope of the issue at hand to decide broad and unasked questions of constitutional law. He passed definitive judgment on Scott’s freedom and the status of Black citizenship and the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and the authority of territorial legislatures to regulate slavery. As Judge Ethan Greenberg wrote in his 2010 book, Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court, Taney “reached out over and over again in order to rule on questions about slavery that were not necessary to the resolution of the Dred Scott case, and that had never been raised before or considered by the court below.” ....

Taney and his pro-slavery colleagues ignored precedent, distorted history and misread the Constitution in service to what they wanted the constitutional order to be.

Or, as Greenberg concludes, the Dred Scott court “abandoned intellectually honest legal reasoning and the disinterested application of neutral principles of law because the court wished to pursue what it believed to be noble and important political goals.”

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