John Roberts’ carefully crafted “umpire” persona has masked a radical remaking of American democracy.
Lisa Graves argues that Roberts’ court has become a legal arm of Trump’s authoritarian project.
From Citizens United to the immunity ruling, the Roberts Court has methodically empowered billionaires and presidents alike.
The Supreme Court’s ethics crisis mirrors its constitutional one — unchecked power, no accountability.
Lisa Graves, an investigative researcher and author of the upcoming book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, joined Susan Demas for a conversation on how the nation’s highest court lost its moral compass. “John Roberts isn’t an umpire — he’s a Trumpire,” Lisa said, describing how Roberts orchestrated the immunity decision that effectively placed the presidency above the law. As a former Justice Department official who’s tracked Roberts since the Reagan era, she outlined how decades of quiet maneuvering led to a court now openly enabling executive overreach.
The discussion traced Roberts’ long project: Dismantling the Voting Rights Act, unleashing unlimited political money through Citizens United, and allowing gerrymanders that made democratic accountability nearly impossible. Lisa connected the dots between those legal shifts and the political reality they produced — a U.S. House shaped by billionaires and safe seats, a democracy skewed toward extremism. “This is not a pendulum swing,” Susan added. “It’s a collapse of precedent dressed up as restraint.”
Their conversation closed with the question of ethics: A Supreme Court awash in billionaire money, spouses profiting from court-linked work, and justices writing their own toothless codes of conduct. Roberts’ refusal to act, Lisa argued, shows the extent to which the Court has become both political and captured. “It’s not about law anymore — it’s about power,” she said.
Tune in to this urgent conversation on the radical Supreme Court with Lisa Graves and Susan Demas.
The Shame of Brett Kavanaugh
I moved to Austin to work on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in April 1999. Looking back on that time, it seems like a dream from an era far more distant than 26 years.
