Inside the Roberts Court and its Failures

The Chief Justice humiliated our Constitution when he offered a president a year-long you-don’t-need-to-obey-the constitution card before telling us the obvious about Trump’s illegal tariffs.

Edwin Eisendrath hosts It’s the Democracy, Stupid on Lincoln Square and WCPT820 AM/Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. Subscribe to his Substack.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Our constitution cannot protect us if we don’t know what it means.

The Supreme Court took months to find Trump’s tariffs illegal, as of course they are. Only Congress has the power to tax. It isn’t complicated. Yet the much delayed 6-3 Supreme Court decision is a deeply complicated collection of opinion and dissent. That complexity results from the hash the Roberts Court has made of American jurisprudence.

That Trump usurped Article I powers to aggrandize himself is cause for impeachment and removal. Simply put, he swore an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, then he violated it, undermined it, and tried to destroy it- all to give himself more coercive powers.

That Trump should be impeached and removed is his disgrace. That he is not, is Congress’ shame. Every day brings additional evidence that what remains of the GOP puts MAGA ahead of America, daily attempting to bend the rules to remain in power. They launched a national gerrymandering war to cheat voters in the upcoming midterms. The SAVE act is a voter suppression law. Their constant hearings into fraud that does not exist undermines confidence in elections. Their attempt to nationalize elections and give Trump control of voter rolls is, as Trump himself says, the key to staying in power for the next fifty years.

Democrats and the American people have fought back. Republicans have not won their gerrymandering war. Not yet. They have not succeeded in passing the SAVE Act through the Senate. They have not managed to nationalize elections.

But there is a heavy thumb on the scale attempting to help them. And that thumb belongs to the very author of the Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s tariffs — Chief Justice John Roberts. His complicity comes from specific decisions, but even more from the way he has eroded the clarity of law.

Recall that three lower courts struck down these tariffs. In May 2025, the Court of International Trade froze those tariffs. They did so because there was a strong likelihood the challenges to tariffs would ultimately succeed (as, in fact they did). There were three judges on that panel, and they were appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Their ruling was unanimous. After that ruling, a U.S. District Court judge ruled the tariffs were unlawful.

That should have been the end of it. But Trump appealed and the Supreme Court not only took the case, but in August of 2025 it allowed Trump to continue to collect those tariffs pending a final decision.

Think about that. John Roberts intervened to give Donald Trump extra constitutional powers for nearly a year. Lower courts were not divided on the question. Their rulings were consistent and clear. Yet Roberts took up the case, then refused to stay the tariffs pending a decision that was never in doubt.

What does it mean for our democracy when the Supreme Court chooses to empower a president to act beyond the limits of our Constitution for nearly a year? Before you answer that, consider that this Court also empowered the president to fire federal employees and to defund scientific research and to allow his ICE agents to engage in racial profiling. They allowed these acts all while musing that they might later be found to be unconstitutional. They allowed them by issuing unsigned and unexplained rulings through its emergency docket.

Justice Elena Kagan told us what to think about that. She wrote:

Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.

She might have added that the emergency docket should not be used to create confusion about what the law is. Many lower court judges have complained that these rulings do exactly that, leaving them without the guidance they need to do their jobs.

John Roberts humiliates our Constitution and is complicit when he offers a president a year-long you-don’t-need-to-obey-the constitution card before telling us the obvious about Trump’s tariffs. He gave Trump the time and the space to act beyond the walls of the constitution to undermine the separation of powers and to consolidate his own.

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At any time now, we will get the court’s ruling on Louisiana v Calais. This case tests the last remaining leg of the Voting Rights Act. If Roberts succeeds in his life-long quest to destroy that most profoundly American law, the MAGA crowd will get its victory in the national gerrymander — a victory based on allowing racial discrimination in political map making. This is, of course, the animating dream of every white Christian nationalist.

Let me be clear. Giving Trump time and space to consolidate power is one sort of thing. Making a hash of the law is another.

The most important job of the Supreme Court is to tell us what the law is. Our legal system is profoundly complex and the ideas that animate it evolve over time. The Roberts court’s utter failure to do this most important job is on full display in the multiple dissents that are part of the tariff decision. The justices argue amongst themselves about their own made-up major questions doctrine. The tariff decision was simple. The pages and pages of argument focus on the various messes they themselves have made of the law.

Our Constitution cannot protect us when it can be read to allow a dictator to consolidate power. It cannot protect us when it can be read to impose a new doctrine that limits one president’s ability to issue regulations but not another’s as appears to be the case now (see Kavanaugh’s opinion in the tariff case and its discussion of the major questions doctrine). It cannot protect us when lower court judges find the guidance from the Supreme Court confusing.

The descent of American jurisprudence into confusing partisan narrative, the enabling of an autocrat’s power grab, the destruction of the idea of racial equality before the law. Mr. Chief Justice, that’s a heck of a legacy.