Yes, US Chief Justice John Roberts, who makes US Chief Justice Roger “Dred Scott Decision” Taney look like John Marshall (pretty much) has addressed a “warning” to Donald Trump (well, pretty much) not to defy the federal courts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary, to wit:
Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system—sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s [referring to southern opposition to the school desegregation ordered by the Court in Brown v. Board of Education]. Within the past few years, however, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.
Well, well said, I would say. There’s just one problem: Chief Justice John Roberts has already given Trump license to openly disregard “federal court rulings” whenever he damn pleases, in Roberts’ miserable exercise in judicial hypocrisy, aka Trump v. United States, which protects the president (and no one else) from criminal prosecution for any act falling within his “core constitutional duties”, as well as, well, “many” (my word) of his not so core and yet “official” duties—two “definitions” left so vague1 that you could drive a Brinks truck through them—well, you couldn’t, but John Roberts could—in fact, he already has, for Trump v. United States is stuffed with a long list of “hypothetical” examples of the sort of thing a president could get away with—examples which, strangely enough, already correspond to all the things that Donald Fucking Trump has already done.
Because what is John Roberts going to do if President Trump does “defy” the Court? Hold him in contempt?2 Nothing is more obvious than that Roberts lacks the stomach for any direct confrontation with Trump. It’s true that the Court, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, consistently refused to render decisions favorable to Trump’s minions in their endless efforts to prevent the smooth operation of the 2020 elections despite the massive problems raised by the COVID epidemic. But the Court completely forfeited the good will it obtained (and deserved) by refusing to cater to right-wing hypocrisy and deceit in those cases by engaging in massive hypocrisy and deceit in its own right by rewriting the Constitution to allow Trump to escape the consequences of his multitudinous and horrendous crimes. I very much fear that Donald Trump will not defy the Roberts Court over the next four years, not because he’s afraid to, but because he won’t have to.
We have already been given an example of “Trump law” even before Donaldo has taken office, in the “brief” that was filed in his name with the Court regarding the potential banning of “TikTok”, ably discussed by Steve Vladeck in his recent post, President-Elect Trump's Law-Free TikTok Brief, in which Trump asks the Court to do something illegal—stop a law (in particular, the law which bans TikTok from operating in the U.S. starting on Jan. 19, 2025) from going into effect until he decides that it should.
As noted below, there are two basic problems with the brief. The first is that it’s asking the Court to do something that the Court … has no power to do. Without at least some view as to the constitutionality of the statute, there’s no basis for the Court to do anything to prevent the statute’s operative provisions from going into effect on January 19. The second is that the brief is, both in that ask and elsewhere, relying on political considerations wholly divorced from law—an ominous harbinger not just from the incoming President, but from his nominee to represent the United States (and not just Trump) before the Supreme Court.
The attorney submitting the brief was John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer in Trump v. United States and whom Trump intends to appoint as Solicitor General—though Steve is a little behind the times in thinking that presidential appointees are supposed to represent “the United States”. The “Unitary Executive” theory of constitutional hypocrisy that “conservatives” have been pushing since the Nixon administration—when they were convinced that they could always control the presidency but not the Congress—has eviscerated the notion that US government officials have the duty to defend and protect the Constitution. No, they have the duty to defend and protect Donald Trump.
The odds are “pretty good”, I would say—Pollyanna that I am—that the Court will simply ignore Trump’s brief, rejecting it without comment. Any negative comment at all would be “impressive”. Any positive comment would be terrifying.
1. Libertarian/originalist but nevertheless good guy law professor Ilya Somin, who can’t stand either Donald Trump or Trump v. United States, nevertheless is so naïve as to think/hope that “If the decision has a saving grace, it’s that the vagueness might turn out to make it less harmful than it seems at first sight, depending on how lower courts and possible future Supreme Court decisions interpret it.” Uh, is it a “saving grace” that, in the future, Big Johnnie and his henchfolk can make Trump v. United States say anything they damn please and then turn around and say they’re just following precedent, because Roberts’ majority opinion is so vague that no one can prove they didn’t follow precedent? To give us a taste of future chicanery, in Trump v. United States itself Roberts pulls a fast one (in my opinion) by specifically exempting Trump of criminal responsibility for any and all of the wild lies made by Trump in the lead up to the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol on the grounds that the Constitution gives the president “extraordinary power to speak to his fellow citizens and on their behalf” [a claim that is, I think, in itself nonsensical] citing as precedent Lindke v. Freed, whose majority opinion was written, surprise, surprise, by Roberts himself, a case which, I believe, turned, not on the “extraordinary power” language, which (I argue), was mere “dicta” in the first place, but on more conventional constitutional principles.
2. In the last extremity, Trump could grant himself and all his minions preemptive pardons à la Hunter Biden. Roberts, in his majority opinion in Trump v. United States, said that the president has absolute immunity in the exercise of his pardoning power, because he is given that power through the explicit language of the Constitution.