The Radical At 1 First Street
Jeffrey Rosen on the uncompromising, radical–and falsely sold–Chief Justiceship of John Roberts:
Since [the end of his first term on the Court, in 2006], Roberts has presided over some narrow, unanimous (or nearly unanimous) rulings and some bitterly divisive ones. And so, it’s been hard to tell how seriously he is taking his pledge to lead the Court toward less polarizing decisions. Then came Citizens United, by far the clearest test of Roberts’s vision. There were any number of ways he could have persuaded his colleagues to rule narrowly; but Roberts rejected these options. He deputized Anthony Kennedy to write one of his characteristically grandiose decisions, challenging the president and Congress at a moment of financial crisis when the influence of money in politics–Louis Brandeis called it “our financial oligarchy”–is the most pressing question of the day. The result was a ruling so inflammatory that the president (appropriately) criticized it during his State of the Union address.
[In 2007] I asked Justice John Paul Stevens whether Roberts would succeed in his goal of achieving narrow, unanimous opinions. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “I just think it takes nine people to do that. I think maybe the first few months we all leaned over backward to try to avoid writing separately.” In other words, once his first term ended, Roberts faced a choice: In cases he cared intensely about, he could compromise his principles to reach common ground or he could stick to his guns and infuriate his opponents, who would feel they had been played for dupes. On virtually all of the most divisive constitutional topics, from affirmative action to partial-birth abortion, Roberts stuck to his guns.
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