OPINION: Take The Hint, John Roberts -- It's Time For You To Retire, Too [View all]
“Judges are like umpires,” John Roberts famously said at his confirmation hearing as Chief Justice. “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them ... They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”
The analogy is vivid and folksy — and even more starkly at odds with reality today than when Roberts invoked it back in 2005.
One way to hear Roberts’ pious words is as a gesture of respect. He knows the truth is more complicated. But he’s describing an ideal that right-thinking people should honor in theory, and judges and justices should strive at least to approximate in practice.
Another way to hear the words is as a gesture of contempt. Roberts is asking his audience to join him in a cynical exercise of make-believe. It is designed to preserve the fraudulent mystique of the high court as detached and apolitical when anyone can see from a surfeit of narrowly decided cases that justices are fully immersed in questions of politics and power.
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This surprising act would be most likely to advance what the Chief Justice says he wants — a revival of public faith in the Court’s institutional legitimacy, and that its rulings flow from something other than the personal agendas of individual justices or the partisan machinations that placed them in their jobs.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/03/john-roberts-scotus-justices-00005051
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