By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — Supreme Courtroom Chief Justice John Roberts slammed what he described as “dangerous” discuss by some officers about ignoring federal court docket rulings, utilizing an annual report weeks earlier than President-elect Donald Trump takes workplace to emphasize the significance of an unbiased judiciary.
Officers “from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings,” Roberts wrote within the report, launched by the Supreme Courtroom on Tuesday. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”
The chief justice didn’t element which officers he had in thoughts – and each Republicans and Democrats have hinted at ignoring court docket rulings lately. Nonetheless, Roberts’ year-end message landed days earlier than the January 20 inauguration of a president who has repeatedly decried the federal judiciary as rigged.
Trump’s agenda – notably on immigration – may put the incoming president on a collision course subsequent 12 months with a Supreme Courtroom he has helped to construct by naming three conservative justices throughout his first time period.
“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system – sometimes in cases with major ramifications,” Roberts wrote. And but, he added, “for the past several decades,” each events have revered court docket selections and have headed off the sort of constitutional confrontations that arose through the civil rights period when some southern states declined court docket orders to combine.
Roberts, specifically, pointed to selections by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to implement faculty desegregation rulings. In 1957, as an example, President Dwight Eisenhower despatched the a hundred and first Airborne Division to Little Rock to combine its faculties after officers sought to defy Supreme Courtroom selections that discovered segregated faculties unconstitutional.
Roberts lamented that “public officials,” whom he additionally didn’t title, had “regrettably” tried to intimidate judges by “suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.” These makes an attempt, he warned, are “inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”
As in previous years, the chief justice averted direct point out of the controversies and challenges brewing inside the Supreme Courtroom itself – together with lingering questions on ethics, a weekslong scandal this 12 months over controversial flags hoisted at Justice Samuel Alito’s properties and sagging public confidence within the nation’s highest court docket.
In a collection of interviews earlier than the election, Vice President-elect JD Vance raised doubts about his constancy to Supreme Courtroom selections. In a 2021 podcast, as The New York Instances beforehand reported, Vance urged Trump to answer antagonistic court docket rulings “like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
The doubtless apocryphal quote got here in response to an 1832 choice Jackson opposed that handled Native People.
Trump himself has usually blasted federal courts – together with the Supreme Courtroom – over antagonistic selections. A spokesman for Trump’s marketing campaign earlier this week slammed the “political weaponization of our justice system” in a response to a federal appeals court docket ruling in New York that upheld a jury’s verdict discovering that the previous president sexually abused author E. Jean Carroll.
Democrats, too, have toyed publicly with declining to implement court docket selections. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew criticism final 12 months for suggesting on CNN that the Biden administration “ignore” a district court docket choice that might have halted Meals and Drug Administration of the abortion tablet mifepristone. The Supreme Courtroom paused that call and, in June, tossed the lawsuit difficult wider entry to the drug.
Roberts has repeatedly used his year-end report back to tout the significance of an unbiased judiciary and to sound an alarm about threats of violence towards judges. Two years in the past, in an analogous vein, he confused that “a judicial system cannot and should not live in fear.”
On this 12 months’s report, Roberts added that “hostile foreign state actors” had accelerated assaults on the judiciary and different branches. In some cases, he mentioned, “bots distort judicial decisions, using fake or exaggerated narratives to foment discord within our democracy.”
The report lands on the finish of a 12 months during which the conservative 6-3 majority granted former presidents sweeping immunity from legal prosecution – and on a timeline that allowed Trump to keep away from a trial on federal charges in two instances earlier than the November election. This fall, the court docket is delving into transgender care bans and a First Modification problem to a bipartisan ban on TikTok.
“The role of the judicial branch,” Roberts wrote, is “to say what the law is.”
However, he added, “judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”
The-CNN-Wire
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