
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
Chief Justice John Roberts, right, with President George W. Bush and Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, October 2, 2005
What’s come over the chief justice? On Monday, John Roberts sided with Neil Gorsuch and the four liberal justices to rule that LGBT Americans could not be discriminated against in employment. Today, he authored a ruling and was the deciding fifth vote, along with those four liberals, that said the Trump administration could not undo the DACA legal protections the Obama administration conferred on the Dreamers.
Here’s my guess: Roberts is a George W. Bush Republican.
It was W who put Roberts on the Court as an associate justice and elevated him to chief a couple of months later. But I doubt Roberts’s sense of himself and his role on the Court is shaped by the fact that it was Bush who appointed him. Rather, I suspect that Bush’s form of Republicanism is his own. That would mean he’s not guided by any particular animus toward gays and lesbians and Latino immigrants. (To be sure, Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign featured alarms about the specter of gay marriage, but that appears to have been more a product of electoral strategy than of personal belief.) On the other hand, Bushian Republicanism also encompasses minority voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering, and Roberts has yet to rule against either. Indeed, in Shelby County, he gutted the Voting Rights Act.
John Roberts: so fierce a Republican partisan he’s willing to gut fundamental voting rights, but still, not subject to every form of bigotry that defines much of the party’s base. For a 21st-century Republican, that seems to be about as good as it gets.