Over the weekend, The New York Times published a series of February 2016 internal memos about the shadow docket that revealed John Roberts operating as the partisan actor he’s always been — despite his reputation as a serious institutionalist that outlets like the Times have long helped him cultivate. It’s a perfect example of why I consider the Times both indispensable and indefensible: it conducts critical investigations that many of its own reporters and editors seem not to read or think about in their own coverage.
Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the billionaire-funded right-wing capture of the Supreme Court, and one of the best people I could think of to talk about these revelations with.
We discussed why people should be enraged about not just the Roberts Court, but also its billionaire backers — and the media that erases the influence of those backers while giving institutional cover to an illegitimate, captured body.
We covered, among other things:
Why Roberts has always been the one undermining the legitimacy of his Court, not the people calling him out for it.
How the leaked memos reveal his improper, politicized pre-judgement of the case about Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
The extraordinary influence of dark money, especially from the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Charles Koch) on capturing the Supreme Court, and why we so rarely hear about it in mainstream court coverage.
Why the “liberal” justices are often the real conservatives on the Court (e.g. trying to defend precedents that were themselves compromises handed down by Republican justices);
How the capture goes beyond SCOTUS; for instance, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who selected Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, also worked to place sympathetic attorneys general like West Virginia’s who could bring strategic cases like one against the Clean Power Plan.
Why the “rule of law” tends to mean “rule by lawyers,” even and especially among liberal institutionalists, and how to focus instead on the rule of justice.
