Roberts Started A Revolution, Dems Enabled It
President Joe Biden greets Chief Justice John Roberts during Biden’s first State of the Union address. (Saul Loeb, Pool via AP)
Chief Justice John Roberts is spearheading the right’s judicial coup — and Democrats’ worship of norms is allowing it to accelerate.
by David Sirota
As the director of the horror show that was the Supreme Court’s 2022 term, Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday opted to script his movie with the same plot twist as Don’t Look Up. In an environmental ruling literally issued on Asteroid Day, Roberts channeled President Jeannie Orlean and aborted the government’s nascent effort to halt the climate crisis imperiling the planet — a decision making it more likely that the human story will mimic the film’s ending.
Amid desperate screams from scientists about the impending climate catastrophe, Roberts limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate carbon emissions. He declared that “capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ but it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme” to halt the disaster.
As The Lever’s reporting has shown, today’s cataclysmic ruling (though slightly narrower than it could have been) is part of a larger judicial coup fueled by dark money that has bought both sides of the justice system — the petitioners and the arbiters.
This coup — which has received far less attention than the January 6 plot — features a cadre of unelected judges appointed by popular vote losers now commandeering control of the government. It has resulted in the evisceration of protections for voters, women, workers, consumers, retirees, and now every living thing on the entire planet.
All of that was engineered by the coup's puppetmaster Roberts, a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce lawyer and Bush 2000 election thief who enjoys incessant corporate media billing as a thoughtful moderate — even as his rulings legalizing corruption made this rampage possible, and even as he now threatens to considerably expand the carnage.
And yet, Roberts, Leonard Leo, and the other real-life House of Cards operatives of the American right are not the only reason this happened.
They were enabled by a Democratic Party and its own cast of West Wing characters, who in the name of bipartisanship, comity, and manners started surrendering right when the putsch began. At precisely the moment Roberts began his crusade, these Democrats constructed an entire religion of normalism — the worship of norms, institutions, and etiquette above every other principle or inalienable right.
There is little chance this nightmare will end unless we first understand how this religion took hold.
“Within The Mainstream”
Some could argue that Democrats’ normalism began in 1991, when Joe Biden failed to block Clarence Thomas’s court nomination and the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed him to replace civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.
But that moment was the prelude. Democrats’ church of normalism really rose in the mid-2000s, when during the culmination of Aaron Sorkin’s television homage to bipartisanship, fully half of the Senate Democratic caucus voted with Republicans to install Roberts as chief justice.
Having finished up a string of disillusioning jobs in Washington, I was quoted back then in The New York Times for being particularly demoralized by Democrats’ refusal to seriously challenge the nomination of Roberts, the Rasputin with the sunny smile who was cheerily billed as “the go-to lawyer for the business community.”
But my anger was anomalous among Democratic Capitol Hill staff, liberal think tanks, advocacy groups, and political committees. Instead, the prevailing sentiment was that of a young senator named Barack Obama, who — in a preview of his White House — lashed out at those begging Democrats to do whatever they could to stop Roberts.
In a much-touted blog post that now reads both like a Jed Bartlet monologue and a terrible omen of what was to come, Obama first scoffed at the idea of Democrats wielding power in an aggressive way:
He then went on to apply the argument to Court nomination fights, telling progressives to shut up and accept capitulation:
Obama did cast a ceremonial vote against Roberts when the confirmation was already a foregone conclusion. However, he not only helped shift the Overton Window to the hard right by casting Roberts as “mainstream,” he also had made a much bigger statement about his objectives and that of his party. He was the high priest of normalism.
Appeasement, compromise, preservation of norms, and surrender to the right in the name of being “realistic” was the new priority — leading to a president who campaigned on hope and change but then reneged on his promise to codify Roe v. Wade, said he “regrets” trying to block Justice Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination, praised the billionaire Koch Brothers pushing our politics far right, tried to help Republicans cut Social Security, and demanded credit for boosting the fossil fuel industry.
It also led to an administration that bailed out health insurers and banks while millions were immiserated, and a White House that berated the left as “fucking retarded” — so demoralizing Democratic voters that a reality TV star demagogue soon took over and gave Roberts the three other right-wing zealots he’s now using to repeal the 20th century.
“A Man Of Honor”
After four years of Donald Trump’s tenure that culminated with the installation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, you might have expected Democrats to discard the appeasement strategy, especially because party leaders have been so eager to get on cable television to cite the January 6 riot as proof that the end of democracy is nigh.