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THE ROBERTS COURT IS WINNING ITS WAR ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY  
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Matt Ford
September 22, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Chief Justice John Roberts has now overseen 20 years of
increasingly illiberal rulings by the Supreme Court. Presidential
immunity, for example, did not exist until Donald Trump asked for it
and the Roberts court gave it to him. _

"Pope John Roberts", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

Twenty years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts took the oath of office
and ushered in a new era for the Supreme Court. His 2005
confirmation vote
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the transition from the Rehnquist court—where a narrow majority of
conservatives and moderates had largely maintained
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status quo on abortion, affirmative action, and voting rights—into
something much more reactionary.

At his swearing-in ceremony, the new chief justice spoke
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about the immense weight of the court’s duty to preserve the U.S.
constitutional order. “What Daniel Webster termed ‘the miracle of
our Constitution’ is not something that happens every generation,”
Roberts said in his remarks. “But every generation in its turn must
accept the responsibility of supporting and defending the
Constitution, and bearing true faith and allegiance to it.”

“That is the oath that I just took,” he continued. “I will try
to ensure, in the discharge of my responsibilities, that, with the
help of my colleagues, I can pass on to my children’s generation a
charter of self-government as strong and as vibrant as the one that
Chief Justice Rehnquist passed on to us.”

The United States is less democratic, less self-governing, more
dysfunctional, and more corrupt than it was 20 years ago, thanks in
large part to the Supreme Court’s rulings.

By that standard, the Roberts court has failed. The United States is
less democratic, less self-governing, more dysfunctional, and more
corrupt than it was 20 years ago, thanks in large part to the Supreme
Court’s rulings. Many of its most important decisions—on campaign
finance [[link removed]], on voting rights
[[link removed]], on gerrymandering
[[link removed]], and on the separation of
powers [[link removed]]—have left us less
able to resolve political questions and issues than any previous
generation has been.

“Umpires don’t make the rules,” Roberts said
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when describing his judicial approach at his 2005 confirmation
hearings. “They apply them.” If Roberts is rarely depicted
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a firebrand or a zealot, few would deny his unmistakable
ideological tilt
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Roberts is often portrayed
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a moderating force. His Republican-appointed colleagues may be working
to covertly advance an ideological project, but Roberts was different:
an arch-institutionalist willing to cast aside his own leanings to
preserve the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a hyper-partisan era.

If that was his goal, then he has failed miserably. Public confidence
in the Supreme Court as an institution has also collapsed
[[link removed]]. When Roberts
was inaugurated, Gallup found in a September 2005 poll that 56 percent
of Americans approved of the court’s job. In July this year, that
number had dropped to 39 percent—the first
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result in the survey’s history.

Some of that decline can be attributed to a shift in the court’s
makeup: Roughly 10 percent of Democrats and around one-third of
independents approve
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the work of a Supreme Court that now boasts a conservative
supermajority. But Roberts shares much of the blame himself. Over the
course of two decades, he has overseen an effort that has steadily
chipped away at many of the twentieth century’s pivotal decisions,
made government less responsive and effective, and handed enormous
power to corporations and the extremely rich.

How did we get here? Any survey of the Roberts court’s impact on
American political life must begin with _Citizens United v. FEC
[[link removed]]._ The 2010
ruling overturned [[link removed]] key
portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which limited how
corporations and unions could spend money on political campaigns
during an election cycle. In doing so, the court limited earlier
campaign finance rulings that had allowed Congress to constrain
donors’ influence and thus prevent the appearance or reality of
corruption.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 5–4 majority, argued
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“favoritism and influence” were an inevitable feature of
democratic governance. He concluded that Congress could only act in
cases of quid pro quo corruption, limiting its ability to act more
broadly to promote public confidence in the electoral system. Kennedy
justified this outcome both on First Amendment grounds and on his own
assumptions about the public.

When past Supreme Court rulings “identified a sufficiently important
governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of
corruption, that interest was limited to quid pro quo corruption,”
he wrote. “The fact that speakers may have influence over or access
to elected officials does not mean that these officials are
corrupt.”

The last 15 years have proved him wrong. Public sentiment remains
largely hostile
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the decision and its subsequent effects on campaign spending. Shortly
after the decision came out, one survey
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in 10 Americans opposed the move. Between the 2008 election—the last
federal election held before _Citizens United_—and the 2024
election, spending
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presidential and congressional campaigns doubled to nearly $15
billion, even after adjusting for inflation.

In the 2024 election, for example, South African-born billionaire Elon
Musk donated
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$300 million to bolster Donald Trump’s reelection bid. The Tesla
CEO’s massive contributions flowed not to Trump’s campaign
coffers, but to allied super PACs and other formally unaffiliated
groups. Under the Supreme Court’s view
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campaign finance, this is acceptable because those groups are
technically independent of a candidate’s campaign and pose a lower
risk of corruption.

By the end of the first week of his second term, Trump made it
abundantly clear just how wrong it was. Soon after taking office,
he created
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Department of Government Efficiency and set Musk in charge of it with
carte blanche to reshape the federal government to his whims. Musk
used that power to fire
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of federal civil servants, blocked
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appropriated funds from being sent to states and nonprofit groups,
and dismantled
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mandated agencies. His abrupt scorched-earth closure
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for International Development, or USAID, will likely kill millions
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developing countries in the next decade—all with power Musk accrued
via massive campaign donations that would have been impossible
before _Citizens United._

At the same time that it has expanded
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influence of money in politics, the court has also
substantially narrowed
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laws that criminalize corruption. In the 2016 case _McDonnell v.
United States [[link removed]],_ the justices
unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor
who had performed a variety of services—setting up meetings, making
introductions, pressuring other officials—in exchange
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tens of thousands of dollars in luxury gifts and loans.

The average American would probably consider that to be bribery. The
high court disagreed by ruling
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none of the activities counted as an “official act,” and therefore
they were protected by the First Amendment. “There is no doubt that
this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern
is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,”
Roberts wrote for the court. “It is instead with the broader legal
implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the
federal bribery statute.”

The court has also positioned itself as an implacable enemy of
political reform in other spheres. The 2019 decision _Rucho v. Common
Cause [[link removed]]_—written by Roberts
himself—allowed
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GOP lawmakers to give themselves supermajorities even if a majority of
voters cast their ballot for a Democratic candidate.

For Americans, the result is a less democratic and less stable
society. Of the 435 House seats that were contested in the 2024
election, only about 30
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them were actually competitive races between Democratic and Republican
candidates. Americans who lived in the other 400 or so districts
effectively faced a preordained choice
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Entrenched partisan gerrymandering also encourages
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extreme candidates, by making party primaries—where compromise and
moderation are often dissuaded in favor of ideological purity—the
decisive factors in an election’s outcome.

Americans now enjoy fewer protections
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their right to vote in 2025 than they did in 2005. The year after
Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were sworn in, Congress reauthorized
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for an additional 25 years. The renewed
and amended act received
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support in the House and unanimous approval in the Senate. President
George W. Bush commemorated
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passage at the National Convention for the NAACP and invited
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rights leaders to see him sign it at the White House, reflecting the
nation’s post-1960s consensus on civil rights laws

In the 2013 case _Shelby County v. Holder
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that consensus. Under the Voting Rights Act, certain states and
counties could make changes to their voting laws only with approval
from a Federal District Court in D.C. or the Justice Department. The
court’s five conservative justices struck down the formula in the
law, ending that practice but leaving open the possibility that
Congress could enact a new one. Republicans have uniformly opposed
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attempt to do so, a response that is unlikely to have surprised any of
the conservatives on the court.

As the Supreme Court was making the nation less democratic, it was
also working to make its government less responsive and effective.
Since the early twentieth century, Congress has created
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upon specialized agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and
the Food and Drug Administration to regulate complex aspects of the
national economy. Americans who grew up or lived in the twentieth
century saw those agencies vanquish widespread air and water
pollution, unsafe foods and drugs, a wide range of deadly infectious
diseases, abusive and fraudulent business practices, and so on.

For the Roberts court, however, those agencies represent a fundamental
threat to the separation of powers. The court’s conservative
majority has overturned
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judges to defer to agencies’ interpretations in some cases and has
struck down statutory protections that insulate some department heads
from at-will dismissal. Congress’s intent
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agencies is sidelined in favor of stronger control by the executive
branch and closer scrutiny from the conservative-led courts.

One of the Supreme Court’s most pernicious tools in recent years is
the major questions doctrine
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Under this doctrine, the court could overturn new regulations if it
thought that Congress’s authorizing statute did not “speak
clearly” enough to allow the agency to regulate a matter of “vast
‘economic and political significance.’” Those terms are
subjective enough to give the court a freewheeling veto over matters
as wide-ranging as student debt forgiveness
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emissions, and vaccine mandates
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In _Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
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president’s power to remove agency leaders, Roberts came close to
rejecting the concept of three coequal branches of government by
arguing that the legislative branch warranted special scrutiny. “The
Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual
liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that ‘differences of
opinion’ and the ‘jarrings of parties’ would ‘promote
deliberation and circumspection’ and ‘check excesses in the
majority,’” Roberts wrote
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quoting selectively from the _Federalist Papers. _“By contrast,
the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the
Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities,”
he continued. “As Madison put it, while ‘the weight of the
legislative authority requires that it should be divided, the weakness
of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be
fortified.’”

Roberts’s misconception, to put it mildly, comes from relying on
what the framers said over what they actually did. The framers
indeed created
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presidency to address one of the principal defects of the Articles of
Confederation. But they also created
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much more powerful Congress under the Constitution than had existed
under the Confederation. For the first time, the nation’s
legislature could
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taxes, fund armies and navies, regulate commerce, and establish
courts. It can even remove
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and Supreme Court justices from office.

In addition to weakening Congress, the Roberts court has laid the
groundwork for an authoritarian presidency. Its ruling in _Trump v.
United States [[link removed]]_ last year,
where the court created
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doctrine of “presidential immunity” out of thin air, allows
presidents to commit a wide range of crimes without fear of future
prosecution. The 6–3 ruling
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that presidents should have “presumptive immunity” for their
official acts in general. For acts that fall within the presidency’s
“core constitutional powers,” like issuing pardons or commanding
the military, presidents now enjoy absolute immunity.

There is no constitutional basis
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for that framework, or for the concept of “presidential immunity”
in general. The Constitution itself only explicitly gives
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to members of Congress in certain circumstances, such as travel to and
from the Capitol and when participating in speeches and debates. The
courts have also long recognized
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immunity as an irreducible feature of the Anglo-American legal system.
Presidential immunity, on the other hand, did not exist until Donald
Trump asked for it and the Roberts court gave it to him.

It is hard to overstate the decision’s radicalism. While the forms
of legislative and judicial immunity that exist in our system are
narrow in scope, presidential immunity is not. Members of Congress and
federal judges can still be prosecuted
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taking bribes to perform an official act. Trump, on the other
hand, could
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pardons in exchange for personal payments of $1 million and still fall
within the immunity ruling’s bounds. The Roberts court’s ruling is
not merely a shield against overzealous prosecutors; it is a blank
check for corruption and abuse of power.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned
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her dissent that, under the ruling’s own terms, a president could
lawfully order SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rivals and
still retain immunity. Roberts replied
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his colleague was “fear mongering on the basis of extreme
hypotheticals.” Beyond that, he did not seriously dispute her
interpretation.

The collective impact of the Roberts court’s ruling is far more
disastrous than the sum of the individual parts. For almost 250 years,
Americans defined themselves by their civic republicanism—their
cultural and philosophical inclination toward self-government, their
ability to address problems and issues through democratic means, their
opposition to despotic or hereditary leadership, and their respect for
the rule of law.

The Roberts court has not extinguished these traditions altogether,
but it has made them much harder to maintain. It is harder to keep
faith in the nation’s political system when anti-corruption laws go
unenforced. It is harder to maintain the rule of law when the
nation’s highest court says the president can commit crimes.
Self-government is impossible when elected officials know their power
comes from gerrymandered districts and wealthy donors instead of the
people.

Americans are historically reluctant to meddle with the Supreme Court
as an institution. Since the founding era, Americans’ basic respect
for the courts has run deeply in our civic culture. Reformers have
successfully pushed through constitutional amendments to
reshape Congress
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the presidency
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and the federal-state balance
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power over the last 250 years. And yet the high court has been
basically untouched since it was last expanded
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1869. This sense of continuity is an added hurdle to reform. Americans
are not only accustomed to the court; they find it difficult to
imagine it changing—an understandable challenge, given it hasn’t
in over 150 years. As a result, any effort to alter the court is
depicted as a radical, un-American effort to rig the system on behalf
of one party at the expense of the other. That is, more or less, what
has happened without reform, however. The only way to restore a sense
of balance and faith in the court—and to make it actually responsive
to the needs of the citizenry—is reform.

Life tenure is often seen
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the cornerstone of U.S. judicial independence. In recent decades, some
drawbacks have emerged
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The sole means by which Americans can currently influence
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court’s ideological makeup is through indirect and gradual measures:
Presidents nominate
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to replace vacancies when they occur, and the Senate approves them
after an exhaustive confirmation process.

Strategic retirements
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that already threadbare bond between the court and the American
people. By choosing to retire only when certain presidents and parties
are in power, the justices can ensure that their successor has a
similar ideological tilt. The result is a quasi-hereditary
institution, one where members actively work to ensure that the
people’s views will not change the court’s ideological balance.

By usurping and second-guessing Congress’s judgment so often and so
enthusiastically in a particular direction, the Roberts court no
longer resembles a judicial body as much as it resembles the old House
of Lords that used to dominate British politics. Our cousins across
the Atlantic finally remedied
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problem in 1911 by compelling the lords to accept strong limits on
their own power—not through persuasion, but by threatening
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pack the lords with as many new dukes and earls as would be necessary
to break the aristocratic grip on democratic governance.

If Democrats retake the White House and both chambers of Congress at
some point in the future, they should not make that same threat—they
should simply do it. The Roberts court has spent the last 20 years
dismantling liberal democracy as Americans have known it. Its rulings
have paved the way for the first quasi-dictatorship in the
republic’s history. Congress should add as many justices to the
Supreme Court as it takes to produce a bench that believes in basic
American values once more: self-government, civic virtue, and the rule
of law.

_Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic._

_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
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and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
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* John Roberts
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* SCOTUS
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* democracy
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* U.S. Constitution
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* Shelby County v. Holder
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