Twenty years ago this week, John Roberts became the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and embarked on a campaign to dismantle vital legal precedents and landmark laws, like the Voting Rights Act. During the hearings on his nomination, Roberts used his skills in oral advocacy to paint a picture of himself as an “umpire,” who would fairly call “balls and strikes,” but his rulings have shown him to be someone who chose a side to aid a regressive gameplan to turn back the clock on our rights and patiently move a billionaire-backed agenda into law.
In truth, Roberts never played for his prep school’s baseball team. He was known as a ferocious linebacker on the football team he co-captained and as a relentless wrestler. That background sheds far more light on his approach to the law than the image he constructed to win the job. He deployed the baseball metaphor initially to persuade George W. Bush, who had co-owned the MLB Texas Rangers, to choose him over Judge Michael Luttig. What a different world it would be if Luttig were chief justice instead, with his principled determination to uphold the rule of law rather than to distort it to exonerate Donald Trump and empower Trump’s destructive policies as Roberts has.
My new book, “Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights,” detailed the origins and actions of Roberts, whom I believe will go down as the worst chief justice in American history. America needs a clear-eyed view of how the Supreme Court was captured to turn a repressive wish list of hardline Republican funders and operatives into binding law, with Roberts at the helm. This biography breaks through the mythology that Roberts cleverly helped construct and reveals why the Supreme Court has acted with such arrogance in reversing our right and protections against tyranny–with Roberts orchestrating key rulings gutting the Voting Rights Act and exonerating Donald Trump, while allowing a culture of corruption to take hold at the nation’s highest court. Roberts is no umpire: he’s at the helm of a judicial junta that is bent on aiding Trump’s extreme action and policies to the detriment of our freedoms and our democratic Republic.
On Thursday, September 29, 2005, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed John G. Roberts Jr. to become the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The vote was 78–22. He was forty-nine years old — the youngest chief justice since John Marshall took the oath of office in 1801.
The vote to give Roberts a seat on the nation’s highest court happened just two weeks after the hearings on his nomination before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearings were held in the Senate Caucus Room, which is now called the Kennedy Caucus Room in tribute to the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). The room is historic, akin to a majestic theater, flanked by twelve enormous Corinthian columns. Its walls have sheltered the somber hearings on the disastrous sinking of the RMS Titanic and the titanic hysteria of some of Senator Joe McCarthy’s tirades against supposed communist plotters in federal agencies.
It was also the chamber where, in May 1973, Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) gaveled in the Watergate hearings investigating the crimes and cover-up of President Richard M. Nixon. While these congressional hearings dominated the news cycle, John Roberts was about to graduate from his private prep school and head to Harvard College. A year later, Nixon resigned in disgrace after public opinion turned strongly against him and the U.S. House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings. Nixon later claimed, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” His claim that a president has king-like powers that immunize his actions from criminal prosecution was met with widespread revulsion and was summarily dismissed.
Roberts entered that historic chamber in September 2005, after President George W. Bush initially nominated him to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She had first met Roberts after President Ronald Reagan nominated her in August 1981, when Roberts was assigned by the Attorney General to help her prepare for her Senate hearing that September. His approach was to instruct her on “how a nominee could deflect senators’ questions while appearing to answer them.”
Twenty-four years later, Roberts was preparing for his own Senate hearing to replace O’Connor, but when Bill Rehnquist died on September 3, Bush swapped Roberts into the chief’s vacancy. So it was, in that famous Senate theater on September 12, 2005, that Roberts deployed a distinctly American analogy to assure the American people that he would be fair. He claimed, “I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind … and I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
On that sunny day in September, Roberts’s baseball umpire metaphor proved to be a brilliant bit of public relations. But the spin he manufactured was not just for the public: It helped him win the nomination. Though Roberts did not invent the analogy, he contrived to deploy it first on the initial decision maker: President Bush. “W,” as he was known, was the oldest son of President George H. W. Bush and had been a co-owner of the Texas Rangers. The younger Bush later wrote that when he interviewed Roberts as a finalist for the Supreme Court — along with Judge Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (an appointee of the elder Bush) — Roberts had impressed him by saying, in W’s recollection, “A good judge is like an umpire — and no umpire thinks he is the most important person on the field.”
Roberts had played sports in the Indiana High School Athletic Association — but not baseball. At the private preparatory school he attended, so small that there were only twenty-two young men in his class, he competed in wrestling and track, and he was one of the captains of the football team. In 2005, his defensive line coach, Dave Kirby, told a right-wing political group backing Roberts — called Progress for America — that Roberts had “loved the process of studying the game and creating strategies to beat an opponent.” Kirby also told legal biographer Joan Biskupic that Roberts, a few inches short of a six-foot stature, was a small linebacker but “feisty and sort of ferocious, sort of like a mean little dog, always at the right place.” That ferocious leader of the football team who strategized about how to tackle his opponents was not on display during his nomination hearings, where Roberts sought to project the image of a gentle, learned jurist.
Key members of Bush’s inner circle, such as Brett Kavanaugh, who was then the White House staff secretary, vouched for Roberts. They knew he would be a sure thing, a bankable vote, for the Right’s political agenda, with its hostility to key legal precedents. In other words, Roberts was no David Souter; operatives like the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo had assured right-wing activists that Roberts could be trusted on issues they cared about. After all, the Bush administration had taken to heart a plea made at a major Federalist Society event in 2000: “No more Souters!” Souter’s purported sin was behaving like a traditional judge, serving the cause of justice with real political impartiality, which to right-wing hard-liners was a failure.
The “No more Souters” mantra has continued to animate the Right. In 2016, seven years after Souter’s retirement, Leonard Leo’s right-hand man, Jonathan Bunch, called Don McGahn, a key legal advisor to Donald Trump’s campaign, to discuss potential U.S. Supreme Court picks. McGahn deadpanned that he had already tapped Sununu to draw up a list of potential nominees because he had played such a decisive role in recommending Souter. Bunch was taken aback, until he realized that McGahn was joking. To Bunch’s relief, Trump would not make the same “mistake” of appointing fair-minded justices like Souter to the nation’s highest court.
There is another telling contemporaneous example of how the “No more Souters” mantra cleared the path for John Roberts. Just four days after Roberts was confirmed with 100 percent of the Republican senators voting for him, Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to fill the vacancy left by O’Connor’s retirement. Miers’s nomination was met with howls that she was not “conservative” or doctrinaire enough. Unlike Roberts, she apparently could not be counted on reliably to take their side and use the Court to advance the right wing’s political agenda. She was perceived to be another Souter: too fair.
Right-wing VIPs like Robert Bork — whose nomination to the Supreme Court was defeated after his extreme views of the law were exposed to the public — opposed Miers. He called her selection a “slap in the face” to loyalists “who’ve been building up the [right-wing] legal movement for the last twenty years.” It took only three weeks of pressure to get President Bush to bail on his old friend, withdraw Miers’s nomination, and appoint Samuel Alito instead to join Roberts on the Supreme Court.
Back in 2005, some Democratic senators saw through Roberts’s umpire act and voted against his confirmation. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) voted against Roberts alongside several other Democrats. All fifty-five of the Republican senators voted to confirm Roberts to the high court; the vote was 78–22.
I had lost the battle over Roberts’ nomination to the DC Circuit back in 2003. My boss, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) agreed to let me ask Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), who was then the Democratic minority whip (the party’s lieutenant whose task was to marshal votes), to not have a recorded vote on Roberts’s circuit court confirmation. I wanted to give the Democrats the chance to vote against Roberts when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, as I was certain he would be if Bush nominated a white man. That is why John Roberts was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by “UC,” or unanimous consent. It did not mean he was unanimously supported.
On September 29, 2005, though, Roberts was sworn in as the new chief justice in the East Room of the White House, where Bush observed that “the nomination power is one of the most serious responsibilities of a president.” Bush said, “When a president chooses a Supreme Court Justice, he is placing in human hands the full authority and majesty of the law.” Bush also recognized that the chief justice “has added responsibilities as the leader of the court and the presiding officer of the Judicial Conference of the United States,” which oversees federal court policy, such as ethics rules for federal judges.
With Bush looking on and Roberts’s wife, Jane, holding a Bible, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens administered the oath. Roberts wore a red tie — as he had at his hearings. Although Roberts swore that “judges are not politicians,” he had chosen the political color that signified his team, the party he had aligned with for the preceding quarter century or more. His wife chose a dress in the shade dubbed “Nancy Reagan red,” after Ronald Reagan’s wife. The GOP, its party loyalists, and its fans have widely embraced that cadmium red color, which newscasters have used to mark the Republican Party since the 2000 presidential election.
Just two days after his confirmation, Roberts — again wearing a red tie — attended the Red Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, a Romanesque revival–style church in Washington, DC. The event gets its name from the deep red color of the vestments of the Catholic clergy, with the red representing “the tongues of fire symbolizing the presence of the Holy Spirit.” The Red Mass has been a religious and political event celebrated in DC since 1952. During that early period, “red” also symbolized something dangerous, the communist “Red menace.” Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prominent Roman Catholic from Wisconsin who gathered power by smearing civil servants and others as communists or “homosexuals,” was elected that year while the United States was waging a cold war with the Soviet Union in the name of eradicating communism. From the very beginning, the Red Mass included prescriptions on law and politics delivered from the pulpit. One of the first homilies, in 1954, when the hysteria of McCarthyism was at its peak, included a condemnation of “communist propaganda” in DC.
The cathedral was also the site of the funeral mass for Rehnquist in 2005, even though he was raised Lutheran, and later the mass for Arne Panula, a powerful priest who led the U.S. arm of a secretive society called Opus Dei. One of its long-standing objectives was getting its inner circle and allies into positions of political power.
Jane Sullivan Roberts, John Roberts’s wife, is the historian of the John Carroll Society, which sponsors the Red Mass. That leadership role was previously held by Bork’s wife, Mary Ellen Bork. Jane Roberts apparently joined the society’s board of governors after her husband’s appointment to the Court. In 2009, she became the society’s parliamentarian. In 2011, she was listed as its historian when it published a pamphlet with excerpts from past sermons, like this one from 1989 assailing abortion, divorce, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s legal precedents on the separation of church and state: “This separation will necessarily lead to moral decay. Indeed, it already has, as evidenced by the number of abortions, divorces, and teenage pregnancies. Church and state should engage in a dialogue to rediscover those moral values founded on the Judeo-Christian tradition and on the natural law, specifically those values which defend the dignity and value of every human being, that are embodied in the Constitution.”
On October 3, 2005, the day after his first Red Mass as chief justice, John Roberts’s formal investiture at the Court took place. Roberts — again wearing a red tie — took the official judicial oath to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon [him] as Chief Justice under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Despite Roberts’s sworn oath, he has broken those promises over and over as he has deployed his skillful partiality in rulings that demonstrate a superseding allegiance to the reactionary political objectives of the Reagan branch of the right-wing movement: to the lost causes that even a majority in Congress would not dare impose, like dismantling the landmark Voting Rights Act.
As chief justice, Roberts has also helped steer the Court to take up annual slates of political issues at the behest of right-wing groups fueled by Leonard Leo and his billionaire benefactors. Indeed — despite Justice O’Connor’s strong admonition that a “change in the law upon a ground no former than a change in our membership” makes the Court look like a political arm — just months after he was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Roberts took up a case to begin to change the law in order to restrict abortion access. It was one of his first acts as the chief: his first tell.
Excerpted from WITHOUT PRECEDENT: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights by Lisa Graves, copyright ©2025. Used with permission of Bold Type Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
