Lisa Graves has seen the billionaire-backed capture of the Supreme Court coming from the beginning, from her work at the Department of Justice and the Senate Judiciary Committee and her 16 years investigating the right-wing infrastructure that has been taking over our government. Her essential new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is full of new information and paints the clearest picture I’ve seen of just how nakedly political John Roberts and the other Federalist Society-backed justices have always been.
Roberts was sworn in 20 years ago this week, and Lisa and I discussed how he’s been putting one over on the American people ever since—painting himself as a sober institutionalist while he has always been a right-wing ringer. Roberts began his career Reagan-era operative deeply involved in blocking civil rights advances, especially efforts to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. He has bided his time to achieve those goals on the Court—chipping away at our rights and rewriting the plain meaning of the Constitution, just gradually enough to keep the frogs from noticing the boiling water until it was too late. He claimed to be just an umpire calling balls and strikes, but the game is actually Calvinball. (Fun fact: he never played baseball, but he was a linebacker who was known for studying the opposition and strategizing how to defeat it.)
Legal journalism often normalizes or soft-pedals the Court’s choices, ignoring its role in handpicking cases, its deep ties to right-wing funders, and Roberts’ blocking of ethics reforms while pretending to uphold standards. What distinguishes this Court from other bad Courts and decisions (and there have been many) is that no other Supreme Court has been deliberately packed with hand-picked loyalists to a particular billionaire-backed agenda. And if Roberts cares about how history views him and his Court, it’s with the gamble that history will be written by the MAGA victors.
