Who Gets to Call It 'Law'
Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that Supreme Court justices are not “political actors,” even as the court’s decisions continue to reshape people’s lives from the top down. Speaking to a conference of judges and lawyers from the 3rd U.S. Circuit in Hershey, Pa., Roberts insisted that unpopular rulings are based solely on the law, not on policy choices dressed up in robes and ceremony.
Roberts said, “I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides. I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” He added that the court is “simply not part of the political process.”
That claim lands in the middle of low public confidence in the court and about a week after the justices handed down a decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act. The institution says it stands above politics while issuing rulings that decide who gets represented, who gets heard, and which communities are left to absorb the damage.
The People at the Bottom Pay First
The court struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, finding it was an unconstitutional gerrymander based on race. The decision weakened the Civil Rights era law that has increased minority representation in Congress and opened the door for more redistricting across the country that could aid Republican efforts to control the House.
That is the hierarchy in plain view: a small circle of unelected judges, insulated from ordinary people, deciding the shape of political power while communities most affected by those maps are left to deal with the consequences. The ruling did not arrive as an abstract legal exercise. It landed on a majority-Black district and on a law built to expand minority representation, then widened the path for more redistricting elsewhere.
Roberts said opinions are based on the Constitution, though he acknowledged disagreement with some outcomes. He also said, “One thing we have to do is make decisions that are unpopular.”
What They Call Neutrality
The court’s recent record has only sharpened the gap between the language of neutrality and the reality of power. In recent years, the conservative majority court has handed down landmark rulings overturning the constitutional right to abortion, expanding gun rights and ending affirmative action in higher education.
Those decisions have not been experienced as neutral abstractions by the people living under them. They have been felt in clinics, classrooms, neighborhoods and voting maps, where the consequences flow downward while the authority remains concentrated at the top. The court presents itself as outside politics even as its rulings redraw the boundaries of daily life.
Roberts also said criticism should focus on rulings rather than personal attacks, and he condemned the targeting of lower-court judges, saying, “That’s not appropriate and it can lead to very serious problems.”
His remarks came after high-profile criticism of judges in personal terms from Republican President Donald Trump, who also targeted Roberts and other justices who voted against him in the opinion that struck down tariffs the president levied under an emergency-powers law.
The clash between Trump and the court shows another familiar feature of the apparatus: the powerful fight over control, while ordinary people are told to accept the results as law. Roberts wants the criticism aimed at decisions, not the people making them. But the decisions are the machinery, and the machinery keeps grinding.
The Court Above the Fray, the Public Below It
Roberts’ defense of the court as “simply not part of the political process” sits beside a record of rulings that shape representation, rights and institutional power. The court says it is not making policy. The effects of its decisions say otherwise.
The justices’ authority is not elected, yet it reaches into elections, civil rights, abortion, gun policy and higher education. That is the structure speaking for itself: a legal elite claiming distance from politics while exercising enormous power over everyone else.