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Left: FILE – President-elect Donald Trump watches a video screen at a campaign rally at the Salem Civic Center, in Salem, Va, Nov. 2, 2024 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File). Right: FILE – Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts joins other members of the Supreme Court as they pose for a new group portrait, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Oct. 7, 2022 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File).
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts offered a history lesson advising respect for the independence of the judiciary in his 2024 year end report released on Tuesday.
The sayonara to last year comes at a key time in the nation’s history: President-elect Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated as the 47th president in less than three weeks.
And, while the report does not mention the once and future president by name, much of the advice is directed at the executive branch.
The report opens with a tidy story about one famous incident in which an executive failed to respect the judiciary in the Americas:
In December 1761, a little more than one year into what would be a fifty-nine year reign, King George III decreed that from that date forward, colonial judges were to serve “at the pleasure of the Crown.” This royal edict departed from the long-standing practice in England, enshrined by Parliament in the 1701 Act of Settlement, of allowing judges to retain their offices “during good behavior.”
The King’s order was not well received. To the colonists, stripping lifetime appointments from judicial officers marked yet another instance in which British subjects living on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean were treated as second class…
The history lesson continues on for a bit as the chief justice explores other areas in which the former British monarch defied or disrespected judges – incidents which led to complaints leveled by “Boston lawyer” John Adams informally, and later, formally, by Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence.
In an annual tradition, Roberts offers various musings about the state of the federal judiciary – and its relationship with other branches of government. Typically, these thoughts are cabined thematically.
One theme of 2024’s report is clearly identified as an adjuration for the executive to enforce and/or abide by Supreme Court decisions.
After essaying a laundry list of “threats to judicial independence,” the chief justice settles in on describing, at length, what he terms the “final threat to judicial independence.”
This threat, according to Roberts is: “defiance of judgments lawfully entered by courts of competent jurisdiction.”
And, the jurist notes, the tendency for such perceived defiance is potentially there from either major political party.
“It is not in the nature of judicial work to make everyone happy,” Roberts writes. “Most cases have a winner and a loser. Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
As Politico’s Josh Gerstein noted, last year, at least two elected Democrats and one Republican called on the Biden administration to ignore a federal court ruling restricting the availability of abortion drug mifepristone. The administration, for its part, appealed the decision in the court system and later won reprieve from the nation’s high court.
The overarching theme of the year-end report is “illegitimate activity,” that “threaten[s] the independence of judges.”
Other threats to the judiciary cited in the report include violence, intimidation, and disinformation.
The report concludes with something not entirely unlike a call toward a unity of purpose – as if the invocation requested for fealty to the system is something of a conclusion itself, foregone.
“The federal courts must do their part to preserve the public’s confidence in our institutions,” Roberts goes on near the end. “We judges must stay in our assigned areas of responsibility and do our level best to handle those responsibilities fairly. We do so by confining ourselves to live ‘cases or controversies’ and maintaining a healthy respect for the work of elected officials on behalf of the people they represent. I am confident that the judges in Article III and the corresponding officials in the other branches will faithfully discharge their duties with an eye toward achieving the ‘successful cooperation’ essential to our Nation’s continued success.”