Supreme Court Not Politically Split, Chief Justice Roberts Says

(Bloomberg) -- Chief Justice John Roberts rejected suggestions that the U.S. Supreme Court is divided along partisan lines, saying he and his colleagues “don’t go about our work in a political manner.”

Speaking Tuesday before some 2,000 people at a New York synagogue, Roberts portrayed the nation’s highest court as a collegial institution that isn’t swayed by criticism or infected by the partisan rancor that has overwhelmed the other two branches of the U.S. government.

“When you live in a politically polarized environment, people tend to see everything in those terms,” Roberts said. “That’s not how we at the court function, and the results in our cases do not suggest otherwise.”

Roberts, a 2005 appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, is a pivotal figure on the court. He cast the key vote this year to thwart the Trump administration’s bid to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

But he more frequently joins the conservative wing in ideologically divisive cases, as he did in June when he wrote the opinion that said voting maps can’t be challenged in federal court as excessively partisan. That ruling was a victory for Republicans, preserving maps they crafted in several states after the 2010 census.

That ruling was one of seven in which the court’s five Republican appointees were in the majority and the four Democratic appointees were in dissent. But that sum represented less than half of the 19 decisions that divided the court 5-4 last term, Roberts said.

“That shouldn’t come as a surprise because we don’t go about our work in a political manner,” he said.

Roberts’ comments came on the same day that Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House is opening a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Roberts would preside over any impeachment trial in the Senate.

That subject didn’t come up during the 70-minute session, most of it a discussion with Rabbi Mark Lipson, a longtime family friend who leads a synagogue in Connecticut. Roberts spoke at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in Manhattan, about a half-mile from Trump Tower, where the president spent much of the evening.

Roberts typically makes only a handful of public appearances each year.

‘Trump Judges’

He has taken on the mantle as the judiciary’s chief defender. In November 2018 he issued a rare public statement a day after Trump decried an “Obama judge” who blocked an administration effort to curb asylum claims.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in that statement.

Asked about that exchange and about a recent brief in which four Democratic senators suggested the court need to be “restructured,” Roberts said Wednesday he didn’t mind criticism of the court’s work.

But “it does not affect how we do our work,” he said. “We will continue to decide cases according to the Constitution and laws without fear or favor.”

Ginsburg’s Pushups

Roberts drew laughs when Lipson asked whether the chief justice could do more pushups than the diminutive, 86-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose workout routines have helped make her a cultural icon.

“She has so much less to push up,“ Roberts quipped. “I don’t think that’s fair. I can comfortably say I can bench press her weight and she can’t bench press mine.”

Roberts spoke less than two weeks before the start of what could be a divisive term. The Supreme Court is planning to consider whether Trump can end President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which prevents deportation of 800,000 young people who came to the U.S. illegally as children.

The justices will also decide whether the main federal job-discrimination law protects gay and transgender workers. The court also has a gun-rights clash on its argument calendar, and the justices could soon add an abortion case.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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