WASHINGTON — John Roberts may have a robe. Still, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has no clothes, according to Democrats who are outraged to bewildered by new reporting that paints the nation’s most potent jurist as a masterful MAGA manipulator.

Congressional Democrats are accusing Roberts of bending, twisting and contorting the Supreme Court — along with the Constitution he swore an oath to — to fit former President Donald Trump and the allegedly illegal actions he took that have kept him tied up in state and federal courts alike since he left the White House four years ago.

New illustrious, behind-the-scenes reporting from the New York Times reveals Roberts personally directed the court’s three historic Jan. 6, 2021 rulings, including the one granting presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their “official acts.”

Democrats are now redoubling their efforts to make the high court a centerpiece of this year’s elections as they continue their uphill battle to pass meaningful ethics reforms to try and rein the high court in.

“Chief Justice Roberts exudes much more of an establishment aura about him, but he really has been a crucial force behind the degradation of constitutional jurisprudence on the Supreme Court,” Rep, Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a Constitutional lawyer and law professor by trade — told Raw Story after digesting the illuminating new reporting.

According to the scoop-strewn NYT piece by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, Roberts authored a Feb. 22 memo to his eight colleagues “that radiated frustration and certainty” regarding the monumental cases winding through lower courts centered on efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While revelatory, sadly, the new reporting on the Roberts Court isn’t surprising to Raskin.

“It's what anybody can see in reading their decisions. We know what's going on there. They're not textualists — they completely ignored the text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Raskin said. “They're not originalists — nobody even made an originalist argument about why the president of the United States should be immune from criminal prosecution for felonies he commits under the cloak of office. And, you know, they have really drifted a long way from any recognizable constitutional jurisprudence of interpretation.”

The carefully manicured image of Roberts as a moderate is now melting away. It’s left Democrats on Capitol Hill debating how to restore public confidence in a Supreme Court many in the party and the public have lost faith in.

“Very short-term thinking”

It’s more than just Chief Justice Roberts moving in the shadows to orchestrate this year’s three seemingly pro-Trump Jan. 6 rulings. Accusations of corruption are also in the air.

Coupled with the estimated $4.2 million in gifts Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly openly accepted from Republican megadonors over the years, as first reported by ProPublica, many Democrats now fear this Supreme Court has been weaponized by the far-right.

“His court's going to go down as the most corrupt in history and, honestly, the most political in history, too,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) — a former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein — told Raw Story on the Capitol steps this week.

Then there’s the luxurious all-expense paid fishing trip Justice Samuel Alito accepted from billionaire Paul Singer, which he publicly defended in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Not to mention the politicking. There’s the upside-down American flag that proudly flew outside the Alito’s Northern Virginia home in the wake of the 2021 attack on the Capitol and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flapping in the ocean breeze outside the Alito’s New Jersey beach house, both of which the justice blames on his wife, Martha-Ann.

As for Thomas, he refused to recuse himself from the monumental J6 cases even after his wife Ginni — and the string of conspiratorial text messages she sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — was found to be central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the last presidential election.

“It might not be illegal, but it certainly should scare the hell out of every American that somebody with that kind of access and power and proximity to a Supreme Court justice can be pushing that type of nonsense," former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) — who served as a technical advisor to the select Jan. 6 committee — told Raw Story back in 2022. “The text messages validate that many elected officials believed it.”

Critics are left questioning where the high court ends and the RNC begins.

“I'm naive. I was raised to think that the justices were there to look at the Constitution and the law and work together to find the best decision for the American people. Now they're a function of the Republican Party, which the court never was before,” Beyer said. “Very short-term thinking. If we look at our 40-some-odd presidents, only one would it apply to.”

The five-term congressman says Supreme Court justices — especially the chief justice — need to open their eyes because, to him and an expanding chorus of critics, there’s nothing partisan about Democrat’s fears.

“There's no other Republican president I would have worried about,” Beyer said. “Not George Herbert Walker Bush or Ronald Reagan or Gerald Ford — certainly none of our Democratic presidents — but this one. It isn't like he's conferring an advantage on the next Democratic president who will do whatever he wants — no.”

The nakedly political and grossly unethical turn of the Roberts Court weighs on the 74-year-old.

“Incredibly discouraging. I've been discouraged by Justice Roberts for a long time,” Beyer said. “I know the judiciary’s independent — I don't ever want to interfere — but the fact that he could let the ethical abuses go on and on, no treatment whatsoever, which is, I mean, the greatest discouragement.”

Last year, after months of punishing press coverage, Roberts reversed himself and signed off on a new, if unenforced, Supreme Court Code of Conduct. It was unanimous.

These days, the signatures of all nine Supreme Court justices also make the document almost worthless, at least to many lawmakers across the street at the Capitol.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

Throughout this session of Congress, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate have relentlessly tried to impose mandatory and enforceable ethics rules on Supreme Court justices—basically, the same ones that apply to every other federal judge in the nation. Republicans have been united in blocking every such effort.

Senate Republicans have the back of the conservative majority on the Roberts Court, much like Roberts has advanced the agenda of congressional Republicans.

“If you go back and look at the most anti-democratic decisions of the Supreme Court — the immunity decision being one, but the little array of insurrection decisions, of which it was a part of in the threesome that's in this article — you see a lot of backstage maneuvering by the chief justice,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story as he walked through the basement of the Capitol. “It reminds me of the backstage maneuvering by the chief justice that brought us Citizens United.”

The former Rhode Island attorney general and U.S. attorney is the second highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he’s been pushing the SCERT — or Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency — Act, which would place a binding code of conduct and mandatory disclosure requirements on the justices.

Ethics reform is one thing. Unlimited corporate funding is another corrosive element of contemporary American politics altogether.

Democrats are still smarting from Citizens United and the floodgates of political spending it unleashed. The chief justice also deftly moved behind the scenes to manipulate that 2010 ruling, Whitehouse readily recalls.

“Remember, [Roberts] had to restructure the case. He changed the question presented. He set up the case so that there would be no record — actual record,” Whitehouse recalled. “He changed the standard.”

That was a bipartisan complaint in that Senate of a bygone, if recent, era. The ruling led then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who co-authored the McCain-Feingold law that Citizens United decimated — to publicly and personally call out Chief Justice Roberts.

"I am more disappointed in him than any of the other four that voted to overturn McCain-Feingold," McCain said back in 2012.

Republicans beg to differ

Roberts indeed has allies. Lots of them. Powerful ones. And they’re laughing in Democrat’s faces.

Republican Party leaders, like former Senate Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — who’s running to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — basically just avoid critics and critical reporting, like the New York Times just dropped, these days.

“I think I saw the headline — that's about all,” Cornyn told Raw Story while hopping a tram under the Capitol.

Before arriving in Washington in 2002, Cornyn served on the Texas Supreme Court. He says Roberts shouldn’t even entertain what his senatorial critics have to say.

“He's got lifetime tenure,” Cornyn said through a laugh. “I wouldn't be taking advice from members of Congress on how to do my job if I was him, either.”

Just as they have with Justices Thomas and Alito — no matter the latest eye-popping revelation — today’s Republicans have united around the Chief Justice, as if they are one.

“Even without having read it, I think extremely highly of him and believe him to be a person with the utmost integrity and dedicated to the independence of the courts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story as she walked through the Capitol Wednesday.

Collins must not have gotten the memo from her Democratic colleagues.

The ‘court packing’ myth

Many pundits hailed Roberts for opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the Dobbs decision, he lost out to the five Republican appointees on ‘his’ court who are seemingly even further right than he is.

Many progressives weren’t buying the righteous, caring and politically aloof version of himself Roberts portrayed back then, and they say this latest reporting shows they were right.

“That's interesting how there's sort of this story out there that Roberts was like a moderate and mediator. And the [NYT] story would suggest that’s not really necessarily the case,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story after voting on the Senate floor this week.

While Republican rhetoric paints all elected Democrats — from the top of the party’s presidential ticket on down — as wanting to expand, or ‘pack,’ the court, only three Senate Democrats have formally endorsed a progressive measure to expand the size of the court, as Raw Story reported last month.

Smith and Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are the three who’ve publicly endorsed Markey’s measure to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s it.

Even with all the negative press, Smith says other Senate Democrats haven’t approached them about their measure to expand the size of the court.

“I haven't heard any,” Smith said.

That doesn’t mean her colleagues aren’t discussing the Roberts Court.

“There's a lot of conversation about the court and challenges to the court,” Smith said. “Once we get through this election and we have a better understanding of what the landscape is, we'll talk more about it.”

Or maybe they won’t.

“We're not going to get expansion”

Some Democrats have already basically, shut the door on the conversation of expanding the court. Many just don’t see it as a practical solution.

“We're not going to get expansion,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told Raw Story on his way to a vote in the Capitol Wednesday. “There's a lot of downside to expansion — we expand, they expand — and it politicizes it.”

As President Joe Biden proposed back in July, Welch and most congressional Democrats now support instituting an 18-year term limit for the nation’s justices.

“First of all, that's a very substantial term, and they're inside, so they have the benefit of protections,” Welch argued. “And then number two, every president is going to have an opportunity to appoint two members, so that means the American people get to weigh in indirectly by choosing the president. I think it would really take the extreme politics out of the court.”

As for Roberts, Welch is no fan of the jurist he’s predicting historians will frown upon.

“He’s very skillful and, unfortunately, a driving force, I think, in the radical redirection of the court,” Welch bemoaned to Raw Story. “The court has got an extreme radical majority. It's lost public respect.”

The Racism Of Chief Justice John Roberts Is About To Be Fully Unleashed

People talking about a 'centrist,' 'incremental' Roberts must not know any racial minorities.

By Elie Mystal - June 2018

People need to back up out of my face with this “Chief Justice John Roberts is an institutionalist who will retard the slide into fascism” arguments. That is a bad take, and one that you can only formulate if your primary concern is with the lives of white males.

I will concede the point that if you are a white male, your privileged little life will not change all that much.

If I sound “hysterical” to you, it’s because nobody is coming to curtail your right to vote.

Nobody is coming to reduce you to the condition of a talking incubator.

Nobody thinks your skin color constitutes probable cause for you to be shot to death.

When it comes to white people, Roberts has shown himself to be an incrementalist who favors narrow readings and subtle change.

But when it comes to minorities, Roberts has consistently shown himself to be a deep racist — albeit one who draws less attention than his cross-burning brethren.

His trick — which works only on white people, but works effectively on white people — is to couch his racism as a plea for color-blindness.

For people who have no color, blindness can seem like a virtue as opposed to a disability.

Take his most famous line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

It is a perfect piece of circular tripe.

But it’s the kind of tripe that some white men go in for.

It’s comforting, to men like Roberts, to think that all one has to do to overcome this country’s legacy of enslavement and oppression is to just… stop.

And it’s alt-right cannon that it is minorities, what with their consistent “focus” on how the color of their skin denies them opportunities, who are the ones that are really holding themselves back by constantly bringing up race.

Roberts could have said that line at the head of mob in Charlottesville, and all the little Tiki-Torches would have waved their approval.

But do you remember the actual context of the line?

He wrote it in his opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.

The PICS case was about a Seattle desegregation program.

Roberts ruled that the program wasn’t narrowly tailored enough to survive.

The only mollifying influence was Kennedy, who wrote separately agreeing with Roberts on some points, but agreeing with the liberals on others.

Roberts was willing to throw out Seattle’s entire desegregation program, because in his world “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race” means that we have to stop making black kids GO TO SCHOOL with white children.

Roberts’s famous quote is the thin edge of the wedge he uses shove minorities back down into the mud.

The fat end is, obviously, Shelby County v. Holder.

There, the allegedly incrementalist, allegedly institutionalist Roberts gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that Southern states no longer needed to get preclearance before changing their voting districts to disenfranchise minority voters.

The “institutionalist,” “incrementalist” ruling overturned 40 years of settled law, and overlooked the fact that Congress actively voted for the preclearance plan as recently as 2006.

For Roberts, none of this mattered. He decided, by fiat, that racism was not as big of a problem in the South as it used to be.

It was in the South that slavery was upheld by law until uprooted by the Civil War, that the reign of Jim Crow denied African-Americans the most basic freedoms, and that state and local governments worked tirelessly to disenfranchise citizens on the basis of race.

The Court invoked that history—rightly so—in sustaining the disparate coverage of the Voting Rights Act in 1966.

See Katzenbach, supra, at 308 (“The constitutional propriety of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 must be judged with reference to the historical experience which it reflects.”).

But history did not end in 1965. By the time the Act was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need[]” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored.

During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

And yet the coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs.

This, again, is one of the more common of the white man’s tricks.

They take something that has been effective at ameliorating the effects of racism, declare victory over racism, and then remove the very thing that was fixing it.

Every time a black man buys a Cadillac, some white man is there to hang a Mission Accomplished banner on his ass and claim “driving while black” has been defeated.

Again, it’s effective and people who claim Roberts is about gradual change aren’t looking at his ferocious commitment to “ending racism” by wholly ignoring it.

Since Shelby County, Roberts has consistently voted against any minority plaintiff trying to exercise their voting rights in the face of disenfranchisement through gerrymandering.

But the most disgusting manifestation of Roberts’s racial instincts showed itself in the travel ban case.

In Trump v. Hawaii, Roberts willfully ignored the objective bigotry that the President of the United States PROMISED to authorize.

Plaintiffs argue that this President’s words strike at fundamental standards of respect and tolerance, in violation of our constitutional tradition.

But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.

In doing so, we must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself.

The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to ignore it when white people discriminate on the basis of race.

Chief Justice John Roberts is an enemy of minorities. He’s bad on women and isn’t going to be a friend to the LGBT community.

This narrative that Roberts will be some kind of mainstream conservative only holds up if you’re used to being a “default” person.

A person who Roberts sees as a potential equal.

If you looked like me, you’d see Roberts for what he is.

Roberts might think that we should all be color blind, but I can see his white ass coming from a mile away.