John Roberts, Eternal Hostage ...."Once again, the Supreme Court’s reputation and honor are on the line, a crisis of credibility occasioned by the possibility that it may not give Democrats what they want. In this case, the Court is personified by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will per protocol preside over President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. And so the intimidation campaign has begun: “Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial will be perilous for the reputation of Chief Justice John Roberts,†insists the New York Times.
Why should it be?
Oddly, but not unexpectedly, that is not made at all clear by Adam Liptak’s report in the Times, which is not exactly a report. Liptak warns the chief justice against making displays of partisanship without ever establishing that Roberts is in need of any such admonition from the august pages of the New York Times. His quotations from Roberts are the definition of anodyne. “We should celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability,†Roberts said in his annual report on the state of the judiciary. Liptak detects in this a coded message to Trump. Well. What else? “As the new year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us,†Roberts said, “we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.†So much for that.
Liptak quotes law professor Frank Bowman, who is the author of a book about impeachment, warning that even by the standard of presidential impeachments, “This one in particular is so poisonous.†About that very interesting claim, we might charitably note that the data set is very small.
So if Roberts gives us no especial reason to worry that he is about to turn into a slavering partisan operative on the model of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then what, exactly, is the issue? The answer turns out to be O tempora! O mores! “The Supreme Court is still reeling from a series of ugly confirmation battles that placed two of Mr. Trump’s nominees on its bench,†Liptak writes. Indeed it is reeling, but the reputational blot there is on Senate Democrats who cynically embraced a rape hoax for their own narrow partisan ends. That’s a neat political strategy: Attack an institution and then demand that it do things your way because it is under attack....
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/supreme-court-endangered-reputation-democrat-warnings-entirely-political/
