Originally published at: John Roberts Is Responsible For America’s Embarrassing Gerrymandering Mess - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes. At the behest of President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are in the midst of making their state even more of a mockery of the concept of representative democracy than it already was. In an attempt to preserve the…
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Roger Taney (in Hell): “We’ve already picked out the drapes for your room, Johnny.”
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the GOP’s narrow House majority… is tinkering with the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts to create five more safe Republican seats
That’s the purpose of government in Republican America, to tinker with the rules so as to keep themselves in power.
Debt? … old news.
Disease? … who cares?
Insurrection? … modern tourism.
Child sex trafficking? … who doesn’t?
Carbon dioxide? … woke science.
Welp, time for summer break!
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Lock him up!
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When a minority of the voters elect a majority of the representatives you no longer have the consent of the governed.
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Everybody thinks of John Roberts as being a pawn in all that has gone on. Everybody wants to hate on Thomas, Alito etc but that is bullshit. He is at the center of everything that has happened to weaken American democracy. He has turned a blind eye to corruption on the court. He has rewritten the bribery law to enable rich men to pay corrupt politicians tips except in extremely narrow circumstances. He has enabled the notion that politicians should be able to select their voters and not the other way around. He is at the center of the notion that corporations are people too. He is at the center of the notion that wealth should be rewarded with unlimited free speech. He gave the President unprecidented immunity. The SOB is the central villain of the early 21st century. .
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Ultimately, the problem lies in representation by single-representative, winner take all geographic districts. There are smarter and fairer ways to apportion representation, ideas more recent than the 1700s. Heck, countries around the world have been using them, so there’s a track record!
The United States needs to move into the 21st century. Time to start planning and discussing how.
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He’s responsible for a lot more than that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21/justice-john-roberts-supreme-court
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Re: John Roberts
The Guardian has a nice bio of good old Chief Justice Roberts:
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Don’t forget Citizens United
And don’t forget the evil of Karl Rove.
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IMO there are few, if any, who are more responsible for where we are today than John Roberts. Worst CJ ever.
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I can think of several who were equally bad: Taney, of course, and those Gilded Age CJs (Morrison Waite, 1874-88; Melville Fuller, 1888-1910) who presided over stripping the Reconstruction Amendments of any positive meaning and pushing through such disastrously wrong decisions as Plessy. Roberts is down in the doghouse whith those guys. His historical reputation (if historians in the post-Trump future are free to express it) will be shit.
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For GQP, they’re all useful as bludgeons to beat the opposition.
They’re not issues that they’ll address.
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Fuck the Court. Political Hacks.
For the Supreme court it seems in some cases previous decisions by the court are like wet noodles. Pliable, easily bendable to fit the political need of the moment.
(((Sigh)))
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And George W. Bush enjoys a happy, healthy, utterly privileged retirement, undoubtedly without a nanosecond of conscience.
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Judge Luttig is considered by many to be top legal scholar and a “conservative’s conservative” (clerked and compared to Scalia on the Appeals Court) .
Hence it carries a bit more weight. I was actually surprised to hear his comments on Roberts (an old friend).
J Michael Luttig, who served on a federal appeals court for 15 years, put the criticism starkly.
“The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.
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Absolutely. Voting Act. Contributions to political campaigns. Trump’s immunity. The only time Robert’s sided with the Democrats was when he wanted to able to vote on the issue again.
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Really? Not this “everybody.”
I give the Dread Chief Pirate Roberts all the “credit” he deserves. He’s been at the helm of the worst court decisions since Dredd Scott, and has been protecting the cartoonishly corrupt Thomas and the trollishly dishonest Alito from even the merest hint of a meaningful standard of conduct.
He absolutely owns the Article III part of this constitutional train wreck, he and his silent partner Moscow Mitch.
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I had a similar thought in reading this. Recall that a psychopath need not be some ax murderer. That just happens to be an extreme example of one.
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