When he became the new swing vote on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts set out to preserve the institution’s reputation of being above politics — but the center may not hold for long.
As the Supreme Court’s term comes to an end, some of the biggest cases left on Roberts’ docket deal with how political power is distributed. These cases, which include one related to Trump administration’s proposed immigration question on the 2020 census and two others related to gerrymandering, will present a test of Roberts’ commitment to keeping the Supreme Court neutral.
Put to the test
With the exit of swing judge Anthony Kennedy, Roberts became the new balance point of the Supreme Court. Roberts has since sought to fight accusations of Supreme Court “illegitimacy” by claiming that the federal judiciary is not political. The chief justice famously rebuked Trump in the fall after Trump blasted an “Obama judge.”
But as the Supreme Court enters its final week of the present term, the difficulty of Roberts’ task can be gleaned from the caseload. Among the unresolved cases, the most controversial deals with the Trump administration’s decision to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
The census question has a direct impact on how political power is distributed between Democrats and Republicans, since censuses are used to apportion the number of representatives each state gets in the House, how billions of dollars in federal aid are distributed, and how legislative districts are drawn up every 10 years.
Democrats claim that the citizenship question would scare immigrants away from filling out the census, and that the question is part of a broader conspiracy by Republicans to suppress the votes of migrants and minorities concentrated in liberal, urban areas. Dems have pointed to a study cited by a now-dead Republican strategist showing that including the question would result in more political power for rural, white districts.
Meanwhile, many Republicans have accused Democrats of seeking an open borders policy to import thousands of Democrat voters from abroad. But either way, it’s hard to see why, as Democrats claim, migrants should have anything to fear from the census question — if they’re in the country legally.
Battle lines drawn
Two other cases on Roberts’ docket deal with gerrymandering, a practice in which congressional districts are drawn up by state legislatures to the benefit of a political party. While gerrymandering is widely condemned as an abuse of power, the term is generally used by liberals accusing Republicans of wrongdoing.
To that end, the Supreme Court is now considering whether to hear two lawsuits alleging gerrymandering for partisan reasons; lower courts ruled that Republicans in North Carolina and Democrats in Maryland drew up districts to benefit their respective parties. The suits could result in the Supreme Court ordering restrictions on the practice.
Conservatives on the Supreme Court appeared ready to side with Trump on the census question in April, but they were hesitant in March about allowing the courts to weigh in on redistricting, which in many states falls under the authority of state legislatures.
The center cannot hold
The wave of politically charged cases on Roberts’ docket reflects a new reality: traditionally, the Supreme Court was held to be above the partisan squabbling associated with the other branches of government. But for many court-watchers, the Supreme Court has never been more politicized than in the Trump era, especially since Brett Kavanaugh’s brutal nomination fight that nearly tore the country apart.
In a time of high-stakes politics, the lofty institution has become a coveted political weapon by liberals and conservatives alike. But what does it mean for the court to be non-partisan? Progressives have long viewed the Supreme Court as a tool to effect their agenda; it is only now that conservatives have a 5-4 majority that progressives are complaining about the Supreme Court being “corrupted” by politics.
Indeed, how long can Roberts’ principled neutrality hold up against a left so determined to barrel through any and all resistance to their power? Liberals are already shaming Roberts in the event that he doesn’t vote the way they want on the census question.
And with the culture war on abortion heating up, even Supreme Court judges have shown political prejudice. In a preview of battles to come, Justices Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg drew battle lines on the conservative and progressive sides in a split verdict on a recent abortion case, with Thomas excoriating abortion as a form of eugenics, while Ginsburg objected to referring to a pregnant woman as a “mother.”
With a divide this wide, is the collapse of the Supreme Court into a political institution inevitable? Roberts certainly has his work cut out for him.
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