This is no longer John Roberts Supreme Court

18) Despite being a conservative "pro-lifer", the Chief Justice is as depressed about this fact as liberals are

EXCERPT FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE TEXT: Sometimes people’s hold on power is very tenuous. Even though John Roberts occupies the most prestigious seat on the most prestigious court in America, that doesn’t mean he holds the cards. He’s probably one of the least likely people you’d expect to truly be mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as the most unfortunate timing of her death. But, I bet you he sure is.

The High Court finally Changes: 

When John Roberts was appointed by President George W. Bush as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 2005, he replaced the late William Rehnquist, who served as Chief Justice from 1986 all the way until his death in 2005. Rehnquist was also an Associate Justice (from 1972-1986) prior to his ascent to the highest seat on the court.

Roberts’ appointment was just the beginning of a much larger fundamental ideological shift after the Supreme Court’s most stable time-period the institution ever had dating all the way back to its original formation in 1790. No President appointed a new Supreme Court Justice, and the Senate didn’t vote a new one in for eleven years, from 1994-2005. The nine justices serving the bench together during this unprecedented time, had the longest uninterrupted tenure together in the history of the Supreme Court.

Shortly after John Roberts appointment to Chief Justice in late 2005, Samuel Alito was appointed as Associate Justice in early 2006. Two Justices being replaced back to back in the space of just a few short months, is not common, but,  as fate would have it, as the very first female justice of the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor was in the process of retiring, her good friend and colleague William Rehnquist passed away while still serving on the bench.

Even though William Rehnquist was the Chief Justice for nearly two decades, people often argued the court was largely controlled by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (especially during the 1994-2005 time period). That 11 year era of the Supreme Court was so noteworthy, there was a NY Times Best Selling book written about it by Jeffrey Toobin - *The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (published in 2007).

The swapping Rehnquist out for Roberts did little to shift the balance of power of the court, as it was one conservative judge in and one out. But, to the ultimate swing voter in Sandra Day O’Connor (which is also well-chronicled in Toobin’s book *The Nine)  there was one moderate Judge leaving, and an incredibly conservative judge replacing her.  The biggest beneficiary of this was none other than Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy, a quirky and somewhat unpredictably, predictable Judge who was not quite as moderate as Sandra Day O’Connor but still viewed as more left-of Center than the non-liberal Judges he shared the bench with.   

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FOOTNOTE 1A: Since the remarkable stability of the Supreme Court from 1994-2005, there have been 8 new justices appointed over the last 17 years. 

1-Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr (appointed in 2005 by President George W. Bush)

2-Associate Justice Samul A. Alito Jr  (appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush)

3-Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor (appointed in 2009 by President Barack H. Obama)

4-Associate Justice Elena Kagan (appointed in 2010 by President Barack H. Obama)

5-Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (appointed in 2017 by President Donald J. Trump)

6- Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh (appointed in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump)

7- Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett (appointed in 2020 by President Donald J. Trump)

8- Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (appointed in 2022 by President Joseph R. Biden)

Then there is #9- The one hold over from that now famous time period 

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas (appointed in 1991 by George HW Bush)

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx 

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FOOTNOTE 1B:  Amazingly President #41 George H.W. Bush still has his one and only Judicial appointment on the high court remaining. #43 George W. Bush has both his appointments remaining. #44 Barack Obama has both his appointments remaining. #45 Donald Trump has all three of his appointments remaining. And #46 Joe Biden has his one appointment is still waiting to officially join the bench. But, #42 Bill Clinton has both of his appointments gone or almost gone (RBG - deceased in 2020, and Stephen Breyer - soon to be retired in 2022). 

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*FOOTNOTE 2:  I really enjoyed The Nine. Jeffrey Toobin  also wrote other gripping books (two of which I also read), one about John Roberts and President Obama’s uneasy alliance, (in particular with respect to the Obama Care ruling)  published in 2012, The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court. Another great book that became an incredibly popular FX Series show in 2016, was The Run of his life: The people v O.J. Simpson (originally published in 1996, but republished in 2015 in anticipation of the show).

Toobin has had a prolific writing career and is also a CNN Legal Analyst. Unfortunately, Jeffrey Toobin is now most famous for having been caught with his pants down during a Zoom meeting.  The upside of COVID allowing people to work in their Pajamas for work, obviously has some major downsides too.

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6 New Justices in the space of 13 years:

When Obama was first elected President, there were two reliably liberal Justices ready to retire. John Paul Stevens, the third longest serving Supreme Court judge, was replaced by Elana Kagan in 2010 which surprisingly was Obama’s second appointment, not his first (despite Stevens' very advanced age). There was also David Souter, who was replaced by Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. The court remained this way until Justice Antonin Scalia’s surprising death on February 13, 2016.

The court was now evenly split ideologically 4-4. Their needed to be a 9th Justice to break this tie, and fortunately for Democrats, Obama was still President. Obama had an interesting choice to make. He could have gone the more progressive route, and nominated a Supreme Court Judge that would excite his base during an election year, (thus alienating moderate voices in the Senate he needed to help him confirm this vote). Or Obama could select Merrick Garland, the likeable yet understated Federal Judge with a reasonably moderate track record, that Obama assumed would be easier to confirm.

Obama, as true to form, went the more practical route and selected Merrick Garland. But, just like any loyal obstructionist, the then Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (now popularly known as Moscow Mitch) sat on his hands and made sure that Democrat, President Obama would not get another Supreme Court Justice on the bench during that last year of his Presidency.

The Trump years brought on three new Supreme Court Justices.  Neil Gorsuch replaced  Antonio Scalia on January 31, 2017, (a seat that was left vacant since Scalia dropped dead on February 13, 2016, totaling 342 days of a Supreme Court that only had 8 justices on it).  Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy in 2018, (a man nobody misses, yet who was widely celebrated by the Trump White House and other Republicans on his way out the door). Amy Coney Barrett replaced the now deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg on October 26th, 2020 (merely eight days prior to the 2020 Presidential Election and only one month after The Notorious RBG’s body was fully cold).

Fortunately, despite all his various short-comings as President, one thing that Democrat, Joe Biden did get right is he got to appoint Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace Stephen Breyer. If Breyer selfishly hung on like Ruth Bader Ginsburg did, we might be looking at President Trump in 2025 making his 4th Supreme Court Justice appointment, and an insurmountable 7-2 conservative majority. But, a 6-3 majority seems pretty insurmountable as is, and there were a lot of rumblings throughout the year about major decisions the Supreme Court was about to make that was destined to change the trajectory of America and her institutions in another radical way. 

The Supreme Court just threw out decades of past precedent in not just 1 but 2 landmark cases

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Liberals have no more ground to give:

As I stated in a prior article of mine On Social Movements, when the reversal of “Roe V. Wade's draft text was leaked, the democrats should’ve been kicking themselves for not better preparing for the conservative onslaught they faced at the ballet box, and more importantly with the numerous appointments of conservative judges on all the major courts over the years (not just the most powerful one). 

“There’s no real value in finger-pointing or fist-shaking, or saber-rattling, as politics and morality really don’t mix. Just know that the Republicans efforts to pack the courts with their kind of judges, was decades upon decades in the making. Democrats foolishly always thought they had the moral-high ground in these debates, until they ceded all the ground they possibly could cede, and then some!  All the ground the democratic party ceded is exactly why they  never codified abortion rights into federal law. 

It’s also why democrats celebrated the death of the Notorious RBG, when in reality we should be ruing her *selfishness for not retiring back in 2013 when democrats still had the majority in the Senate during President Obama’s second term. Instead we all witnessed the confirmation of Amy Coney Barret a mere week before a new President was elected to office.” - For Social Movements to be considered…May 03, 2022  

For Social Movements to be considered "A movement" they actually have to work

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 Machiavelli cared more about wielding power then he ever did about ideology:

Sometimes people’s hold on power is very tenuous. Even though John Roberts occupies the most prestigious seat on the most prestigious court in America, that doesn’t mean he holds the cards. He’s probably one of the least likely people you’d expect to truly be mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as the most unfortunate timing of her death. But, I bet you he sure is.

“The chief justice had zero support for his middle of the road effort on Roe v. Wade”

“No one can deny that from 2018 until when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this was the Roberts court in every way that mattered,” Vladeck said. “The consequences of that no longer being true are incalculable but run the gamut from what the court is doing to how justices are behaving to how the institution functions. ... When the median vote on the court became Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, it’s a very different court than any of us have seen in our lifetimes.” - Josh Gerstein 06/25/2022 - Politico

The implication here is that prior to 2018, before Brett Kavanaugh joined the court, Chief Justice Roberts shared the power with Anthony Kennedy, which in reality was a way better deal than what the Chief Justice has now.

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Another informative book on the workings of the modern Supreme Court: 

Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by Jan Crawford Greenburg, is a book I read shortly after it first came out (in 2008). Even though I read it at least thirteen years ago, one of the biggest takeaways I got from the book was how quietly influential Justice Clarence Thomas actually is. This is despite the fact that he says only a few words (if even that) during public arguments to the Supreme Court. The author went into great detail about how close Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia were, and how it was Thomas who had much more influence over Scalia then what everyone really perceived.

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Umm…Justice Thomas, with all due respect, isn’t it time to finally retire?

Clarence Thomas, the longest serving Justice on this current court, is an incredibly interesting case study, for better and for worse. For one thing, he had one of the most acrimonious Supreme Court hearings, ever! Keep in mind this is in 1991, five years before Fox News was even a thing. This was at a time when politicians, especially our Presidents were still by and large pretty boring. 

Clarence Thomas is only the *second black man to ever serve on the highest court. He’s also the most conservative member of the Supreme Court. This despite the fact that I admiringly read of him mentoring young black high school students in inner-city Washington DC, as captured in the wonderful book written by Ron Suskind,  A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. I also had an African American female college professor who shared with me how she read Thomas’s autobiography, after being implored by one of her students a few years back, and she was blown away at the man’s upbringing in rural Georgia, discovering that English wasn’t even his first spoken language.  

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FOOTNOTE 3*: I’m shocked Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. That just goes to show how little I even knew, until I started doing research for this article. (It also dates me, as I was 10 years old in 1991 and new nothing about the Supreme Court at that time). For those of you who don’t know Thurgood Marshall; Watch the movie about him called MARSHALL (played by the late great Chadwick Boseman), when he was a young civil-rights lawyer just emerging as a force to be reckoned with.

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Future Shock is the new status quo:

Lets not forget to mention that there is mountains of evidence that Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginny Thomas is quite possibly a leading member of one of the biggest Trump cults, QAnon (Q for short). Okay, in reality she more than likely isn’t a Q member. But, she sure is in the center of the controversies surrounding the January 6th Capitol insurrection.  

 These are really bizarre times, and really bizarre leaders we have behind the scenes that most of us don’t even know about. The fact that Donald Trump helped create this court, running for President guaranteeing he would deliver a court like this. Donald Trump, a man who actually doesn’t even agree with outlawing abortion, delivered this court to the American people. I loathe the idea of our country being largely undone, but the cause for optimism nowadays just isn’t that high. 

The recriminations, and the hand-wrangling do little to assuage a country that is literally on fire about this ruling.  In my earlier piece just this past week, I discussed how the Supreme Court just threw out decades of past precedent, in not only this last ruling, but in some of their other most notable cases as well.

Of course politicians get to do their best work when people are distracted, hence why the limited gun reform bill that passed congress, passed now. There was no way the GOP would have been willing to work with Democrats on this bill unless there were convenient distractions happening, that had their constituency not as focused on this issue as they otherwise might have been.