I admit it: I’m a dumb, average American. The product of an average high school and a college dropout. But, you know, I read and stuff. And I thought I knew a little something about America. Nope. Turns out, I’m an idiot.
For decades, I was under the mistaken impression that presidential bribery is one of them fancy “high crimes and misdemeanors” I learned about in Social Studies. Imagine my chagrin when I learned just this week that it’s perfectly acceptable for the nation’s highest elected official to accept a $400 million “gift” from a foreign nation.
Just a couple of months ago, I thought that when a president creates a meme coin which allows them to accept cash gifts from whomever wishes to purchase their favor, that’s what the lawyers call “money laundering.” Nope. Turns out plying presidents with cash is A-OK.
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If only I’d grown up “having a real sense of how our government works,” as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts bemoaned while addressing disrespect for the rule of law and the “trashing of justices” in a speech to Georgetown School of Law’s graduating class.
Exactly! Schnook that I am, I always thought that Congress has the sole authority to create or dismantle federal agencies. I have no idea where I got that idea. (It was the Constitution.)
Moreover, until July 1, 2024, I believed that nobody was above the law. Not even the President. Thank you and five of your colleagues, Chief Justice Roberts, for showing me the error of my ways. Thank you for teaching me exactly how our system of government works.
How is it possible that John Roberts is deriding the state of public school civics education when his court has presided over the legalized decimating of the very virtues he decries have been lost?
How is it possible that he blames the public for not understanding how the government works when literally every American knows that the Supreme Court has the final decision on legal matters, yet he does nothing when the President openly defies a Supreme Court ruling to return a wrongly deported man to the United States?
Why do I feel like the average, dumb American knows a hell of a lot more about how the American justice system actually works than John “Harvard Law ‘79” Roberts? That they understand exactly what’s wrong with current system of the American government—and it isn’t a lack of laudatory book reports by sixth graders?
As one of those average, dumb Americans, I’m of the opinion that Roberts fears for the sanctity of the law because he, correctly, understands that Americans faith in the judicial system has been undermined. Not by a lack of education, but by a precise understanding of our two-tiered legal system and by many of his decisions, including Citizens United, Dobbs and the aforementioned Trump v. United States.
What Roberts fears losing isn’t respect for the law, but rather respect for the institutions charged with upholding it—including his own. According to Gallup, reverence for the Supreme Court has declined markedly in the past five years. They are the lowest public opinion numbers of his tenure as Chief Justice, and among the court’s lowest public opinion numbers in history.
So, has the American education system grown markedly worse? Or has the American public somehow divined that John Roberts is presiding over the most nakedly corrupt, nakedly partisan, reactionary court in American history?
Roberts is forever described as an “institutionalist,” but he’s personally overseeing the destruction of his own. To describe the rule of law as “endangered,” as Politico reported of his Georgetown Law speech, feels a little too cute by half. Yes, it is endangered, and it’s his milquetoast response to that danger that’s exacerbating the crisis. Which leads me to believe one of two things are true.
Either, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is as ineffectual in his objections as our current Minority Leader in the Senate are in his, or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is trying to play it both ways: clutching his robes as he bemoans an unconstitutional agenda of which he secretly approves. I don’t pretend to know which of the two is true, but nor do I see a third possibility.
But what do I know? I’m just an average, dumb American.
