There is no bigger con man in the United States than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Not even President Donald J. Trump.

The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at 50 years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight senators, including 22 Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment.

The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).

As is his prerogative as chief justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent.

The court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms.

Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”

In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration, Roberts authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”

In another exchange at his confirmation hearing, this time with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, Roberts sought to explain away his memos as just part of the job he had been assigned at the time rather than a reflection of his personal views, saying, “I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships [with Second Circuit Judge Fred Friendly and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist]. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the Attorney General... It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change.”

Despite young Roberts’s warnings, the 1982 amendments were passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support by a vote of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate. President Ronald Reagan quickly reversed course and signed the amendments into law on June 29, 1982. In 2006, Congress extended the VRA for another 25 years with even greater bipartisan support, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.

Once installed as the nation’s 17th chief justice, it didn’t take Roberts long to show his true colors, declaring in a 2007 majority opinion on busing in public schools (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number One) that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Two years later, in an otherwise obscure case (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder) involving the elected board of a municipal water district in Texas, he turned his attention to Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter discrimination, to obtain advance federal approval—known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Although his opinion left the sections intact, Roberts warned that unless Congress updated the formula to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance process, the Supreme Court might stop the process altogether.

In 2013, he made good on that threat. Writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Shelby County v. Holder, he invalidated the preclearance formula and effectively put an end to the process, reasoning that racism in American elections was a thing of the past and there was no longer any justification for singling out Southern states for remedial measures. Shelby led swiftly to an upsurge in restrictive voter ID laws, voting-roll purges, and limitations on mail-in balloting in Republican-led states across the country, especially in the South.

Although Roberts also declared in Shelby that Section 2 of the VRA “is permanent, [and] applies nationwide,” he returned to the attack with his 2019 majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that “political gerrymandering” claims cannot be brought in federal courts because they present nonjusticiable “political questions.” Political gerrymandering has a long history in the United States, Roberts noted, dating back to the salamander-shaped voting districts created by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 to give an advantage to his Democratic-Republican Party. “The Constitution,” Roberts argued in Rucho, “supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly” and thus provides no basis for proportional political representation. Lacking objective standards to work with, he concluded, the federal courts had no business entering the redistricting wars.

Rucho, in turn, set the stage for Callais in 2026, which put an end to claims of racial gerrymandering, the last bastion of relief from discrimination available under the VRA. Callais gave red states permission to redesign their electoral maps to eliminate “majority-minority districts” (where a minority group comprises a majority of the population) that had been created to boost the electoral power of Black and Latine voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Election law........

© Common Dreams