01/09/2026
Chief Justice Roberts’s End of the Year Report Is an Embarrassing Fairy Tale
8 Jan 2026 Austin Sarat and Lauren Stiller Rikleen
Chief Justice Roberts’s End of the Year Report Is an Embarrassing Fairy Tale
Posted in: Courts and Procedure
One year ago, we co-wrote an article for this publication, analyzing several Year End Reports on the Federal Judiciary issued by Chief Justice John Roberts. Presciently entitling the piece “Chief Justice Roberts’s Annual Report Foreshadows a Future of Gaslighting,” we noted the many ways this annual ritual gaslights the country, under the guise of an overview of some era in American history.
With his recent release of the 2025 Report, the Chief Justice again delivered on that title and tumbled to a new level of “nothing to see here” leadership. Instead of engaging with the constitutional crisis that unfolded last year and examining ways that the federal courts responded to it, Roberts offered a bland civics lesson, devoid of any insight into the Supreme Court’s outsized role in enabling the nation’s slide into autocracy.
One might expect an annual report to be an occasion for self-reflection, but Roberts doesn’t provide any. He does not appear to recognize the fact that he has used his leadership of the Court to promote his fever dream of an all-powerful president, while breaking American democracy in the process.
Examples of his complicity are numerous, and include his embrace of the unitary executive theory, last term’s sweeping presidential immunity decision, and the Court’s overuse of the shadow docket to greenlight President Donald Trump’s egregious abuses of power. The last of these has the additional effect of undermining the valiant federal district court judges whose meticulously reasoned decisions are cast aside with barely a word by a SCOTUS majority eager to carry out their agenda.
There is a profound cluelessness in the Chief Justice’s effusive praise of the Founders in this year’s annual report, even as he is busy undoing their vision of constitutionalism. And if that were not enough, he also seems oblivious to the complexities of America’s Founding.
All that makes this year’s annual report an embarrassment for its author, particularly at the conclusion of a year in which the President of the United States has mounted a sustained assault on the “inalienable rights” of people residing in this country.
Roberts begins his report by celebrating Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet “Common Sense“ became an inspiration for the authors of the Declaration of Independence. The Chief Justice notes with approval Paine’s view that “a government’s purpose is to serve the people.” He ignores, however, Paine’s warning that “a thirst for absolute power” is a “disease.”
In 1776, that warning applied to a British king. In our era, Paine’s words are directly applicable to a president of the United States who falsely claims that the Constitution authorizes him “to do whatever I want.”
Paine knew that a “thirst for arbitrary power” had no place in America, but the Chief Justice seems uninterested in a contemporary application of these words.
Surely, a modern Thomas Paine would rouse his countrymen to oppose a president who behaved as a king. Roberts, instead, has provided the conditions that nurture that behavior.
If Roberts had read Paine’s Common Sense more closely, he would have noted the universalism of its promises. As Paine says, “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested.”
That sentiment is hard to reconcile with President Trump’s idea that our government’s actions should be driven by fierce and exclusionary nationalism, a nationalism that regards people born in America as somehow superior to the immigrant, the foreigner, the stranger.
Roberts’s version of Paine omits the fact that Paine helped produce the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man” and two years later wrote a pamphlet in which he plainly stated that “Man is not the enemy of man,” and “human rights are universal.” Think of that as we contemplate the way President Trump refers to his political opponents as “vermin” and blames immigrants for “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Here again, Chief Justice Roberts does not draw the obvious inference from Paine to the present.
And in a moment of either cluelessness or willful arrogance, Roberts singles out for special mention the twenty-seven grievances against King George III listed in the Declaration of Independence, without a hint of recognition that many of them seem to apply to President Trump’s conduct in office.
The only grievance that the Chief specifically mentions in this year’s annual report should be the most disconcerting to him. Recall that the Declaration accuses the king of making “Judges dependent on his will alone.”
Trump periodically refers to judges he has appointed to the bench as “my judges” and clearly believes that judges should do his bidding. Roberts, who offered tepid words of concern following the president’s attacks on the judiciary earlier in 2025, is strangely silent in his report about what Trump is doing to the judiciary.
Were the Chief Justice to have used Thomas Paine to help him understand Trump’s America or pointed out the president’s systematic attack on the promises of the Declaration of Independence, he might have had to acknowledge his own role in facilitating that attack and in rolling back individual rights during his time on the Supreme Court.
But he doesn’t go there.
The closest he comes is when he says that each branch of government is responsible for “living up to the promises of the Declaration.” Sadly, there is no recognition of the Supreme Court’s oversight of the demise of the constitutionally envisioned separation of powers in favor of a supremely powerful executive, the kind of “unitary executive” Roberts had advocated for as a young lawyer working for Ronald Reagan.
In the end, the Chief Justice quotes an unlikely source, President Calvin Coolidge, in an effort to reassure his countrymen that “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United states with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of Freedom and Justice remain firm and unshaken.”
Were it only to be true.
Ensuring that those charters of “Freedom and Justice” endure will require more than offering a self-serving civics lesson. It will require the Chief Justice to look in the mirror and stop giving the president a blank check. And it will require him to stop gaslighting the American people.
Maybe reading more Thomas Paine will inspire him to do so.
Posted in: Courts and Procedure, Politics
Tags: Democracy, John Roberts, SCOTUS
