John Roberts

Pity poor John Roberts. No, he’s not corrupt or compromised. He is simply a man who has found himself at a pivotal time and place in a position of great responsibility for which he is utterly unsuited. He’s not a dumb man. He is, in fact, a very smart man – Hugh Hewitt knew him personally in the Reagan administration and testifies to that. I have no doubt it’s true. I know many smart people who have similar flaws.

Republican lawmakers are conflicted over how to respond to President Trump’s confrontational standoff with the federal judiciary, which drew a rare public rebuke Tuesday from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Trump and his allies are directing their attacks more frequently against judges who threaten to slow or block the president’s ambitious agenda, putting GOP lawmakers in an uncomfortable spot.

At the end of an eventful year at the Supreme Court that included a ruling giving former President Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for his conduct while in office, reporting that controversial flags had flown at the homes of Justice Samuel Alito, and an ethics inquiry from Senate Democrats that found more gift trips that Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose, Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual report, released on Tuesday evening, focused on what he sees as the threats to judicial independence.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump built a conservative 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Ever since, the nation’s highest court has repeatedly issued increasingly extreme, far-right decisions on topics of abortion, race, the environment, corruption, and much more. 

In his annual year-end report, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts expressed disdain for public officials who have tried to coerce and intimidate judges over the last year.

Attempts to go beyond standard criticism of judges as they weigh in on important cases, to outright intimidation or calls to ignore their decisions, are examples of “illegitimate activity,” Roberts said in his annual report released every year on New Year’s Eve.

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. By a vote of 8-1, the court ruled that the law does not violate the Constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” The ruling in United States v. Rahimi was the court’s first Second Amendment case since it threw out New York’s handgun-licensing scheme nearly two years ago. In that case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v.

In a 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a major gun rights case Friday that protective orders can bar people accused of domestic violence from owning firearms. Zackey Rahimi, a Texas man, unsuccessfully claimed it’s unconstitutional to restrict people under domestic violence protective orders from accessing firearms.

“Since the Founding, the Nation’s firearm laws have included regulations to stop individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” the court’s majority opinion read.

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that bans guns for those subject to domestic violence restraining orders (DVROs) in the first major test of the Second Amendment at the high court this term.

In an 8-1 opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the court's majority said, "[W]e conclude only this: An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment." Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter.

Secretly recorded conversations with Justice Alito and his wife tell us mostly that the justice worries about polarization and his wife handles the flags.

One of the hallmarks of the now–annual silly–season efforts to discredit and delegitimize the Supreme Court is that the hit jobs are aimed to make up in volume what they lack in content. So long as there is a constant drumbeat of new stories, the narrative can be kept alive even as one story after another crumbles.