The Ultimate 20-Year Shift: How John Roberts Transformed the US Supreme Court to the Right

John Roberts Supreme Court: John Roberts was not intended to serve as the chief justice of the United States. He was appointed as one of the eight associate justices on the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court by President George W. Bush in 2005. However, Bush chose to appoint Roberts to the position when then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist passed away a few weeks later.

Roberts has been a key character in the court’s history in the 20 years since he was appointed chief justice on September 29, 2005, leading it through a significant period when its conservative majority has sharply shifted U.S. law to the right. And when a new nine-month term begins in October, with more significant cases pending, there are no indications that things will slow down.

Abortion, gun rights, racism, religious freedom, campaign finance legislation, federal regulatory power, transgender policy, and presidential immunity are just a few of the issues in which the Roberts Court has left its imprint. Additionally, it has rendered a number of rulings this year that support Republican President Donald Trump’s unusual use of executive authority.

Long seen as an institutionalist who favored gradual change, Roberts was a well-mannered conservative who grew up in the American Midwest. However, the flurry of significant decisions in the five years after conservatives won a 6-3 majority on the highest court in the United States in 2020, following Trump’s successful appointment of three justices during his first term in office, is nothing short of a revolution in American jurisprudence.

Roberts, 70, has been accused by his detractors of bending the law to suit his preferred course of action. According to Eric Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University, Roberts “changed the rules of the constitutional game” more than any other chief justice in American history.
For example, Roberts has played a significant role in extending presidential authority, most notably in the 2024 ruling he authored in support of Trump, which acknowledged that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts while in office. According to Roberts, this kind of protection was necessary since the U.S. constitution divides authority between the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of government.

In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the decision essentially established a “law-free zone around the president.”
“In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law,” Sotomayor said.
The Roberts court, according to conservative legal experts, has overturned numerous liberal precedents that were established decades ago by the court, including the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion throughout the country.

“Affirmative action, abortion, firearms, and the administrative state have all seen significant jurisprudential errors rectified by the Roberts Court, the most conservative court in a century. The general opinion is that conservatives have won the war, at least for the time being, even if they may not have prevailed in every significant policy dispute before the court, according to Robert Luther III, a law professor at George Mason University.

Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former Bush administration Justice Department official, said, “Conservatives overwhelmingly welcome the court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, its ruling that the (U.S. Constitution’s) Equal Protection Clause bars racial preferences in college admissions, and its various rulings on religious liberty.”
Although he has sometimes been more circumspect than some of his fellow conservative justices, Roberts has personally authored the rulings in some of the most significant cases decided in the last 20 years.

Political science professor Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania stated, “John Roberts has played a significant leadership role in bringing those things about. The modern conservative legal movement had been trying for a half-century to achieve the changes in American constitutionalism that have come under his leadership.”

TWO REBUKES

This year, the Roberts Court has been a welcoming venue for Trump, issuing emergency rulings that have enabled the president to enact hardline policies that lower courts had blocked, including cracking down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, banning transgender individuals from the military, mass federal layoffs, and immigration.

There is no greater contrast in temperament between the outspoken Trump and the amiable Roberts. Roberts has chastised Trump in written remarks twice, in 2018 and March, for criticizing federal judges who have stood in the way of his strict immigration policy.

Following Trump’s request to impeach a judge who ordered the administration to stop removing Venezuelans it has accused of being gang members, Roberts made his remarks public this year. Roberts said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Roberts hasn’t said anything since, however, while Trump and other administration officials continue to label judges who have rejected the president as “radical left,” among other negative labels.

RACING CASES

Roberts has had an especially significant influence on racial law. In his 2023 ruling, the court declared that racial discrimination in college admissions violated the equal protection clause of the constitution. Such regulations had been affirmed by a court with a different ideological composition only seven years before.

Roberts authored the court’s 2013 ruling that eliminated the need for states with a track record of racial discrimination to get federal permission before to making changes to their voting rules.
Roberts was the author of the court’s 2007 ruling, which cited the equal protection clause and rejected school districts’ use of race as a determining factor in student assignment to schools in an effort to accomplish integration. Among his most well-known statements was this one from that ruling: “The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.”

In the 2008 5-4 decision that established that individuals have a constitutional right to keep weapons in their homes, Roberts provided the decisive vote that altered gun ownership in the United States. The court issued significant decisions in 2010 and 2022 that built on the finding.

A CHANGE IN PLANS

Roberts was first proposed by Republican Bush to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Bush, however, selected Roberts to be chief justice when Rehnquist passed away unexpectedly around six and a half weeks later.

Roberts oversees the Supreme Court in this role, leads the federal judiciary as a whole, and performs ceremonial tasks including delivering the presidential oath of office, which he has done for Trump and Democratic former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Additionally, Roberts presided over the first of Trump’s two impeachment proceedings in 2020; he was acquitted in the Senate both times.
During his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings, Roberts, a federal appellate court judge at the time who had served in the administrations of Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, received bipartisan acclaim for his cool head, intelligence, and rustic Midwestern charm.
“Judges and umpires are similar. Rules are not made by umpires. They put them to use. Judges and umpires play crucial roles. They ensure that everyone abides by the rules. Using a baseball analogy, Roberts stated, “But it is a limited role.”

The Senate confirmed Roberts by a vote of 78–22. “And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat,” he said.
Under Roberts, the court has seen a significant transformation.
According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, “Roberts was a conservative when he came to the court, but the court around him was less conservative overall because you had swing justices,” referring to justices on the court’s ideological center who frequently determined the outcome of significant cases.

“But over the 20 years that Roberts has been a justice, the Supreme Court has become much more conservative and constitutional law has become much more conservative,” Chemerinsky said.
Conservatives have sometimes been angry with Roberts. In a 2012 decision he wrote that affirmed Obama’s landmark healthcare program, he deviated from the court’s conservative group. Because of the ruling, some commentators have seen Roberts as an institutionalist who puts upholding the legitimacy of the Supreme Court above pursuing individual political or policy goals

The Roberts method was explained in the court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which reversed Roe, which had acknowledged a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. Roberts rejected going so far as to completely overturn the Roe ruling, but he concurred with the other five conservative justices in sustaining a Mississippi legislation supported by Republicans that prohibited abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

His reputation as an institutionalist was deemed exaggerated by several legal professionals. For instance, Stephen Wermiel, a law professor at American University, said his strategy in Dobbs would have merely delayed explicitly rejecting Roe until later.
“I believe he would have voted to overrule Roe in the next case,” stated Wermiel.