Move over, Roger Taney and Melville Fuller.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice:
American history has no shortage of legendarily bad chief justices and disgraceful decisions. But Chief Justice John Roberts has overseen the wholesale corruption and capture of the Supreme Court, and history should look back on his tenure with revulsion. This isn’t about whether there are individual cases from the past that are worse than any individual Roberts-era decision. It’s that compared to previous chief justices, the entire arch of the Robert Court has been about enshrining discrimination into law and protecting the powerful at the expense of the powerless.
The Taney Court
When people talk about the worst Supreme Court era, they’re often talking about Chief Justice Roger Taney, who headed the Court from 1836 to 1864. Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case widely considered to be the Supreme Court’s most shameful decision. Taney’s brazenly racist opinion said that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to the United States and sold into slavery could never be an American citizen. The majority also held that enslaved people were property, and because the Fifth Amendment forbids deprivation of property without due process, Congress could not ban slavery in the federal territories. If the Taney Court had only given us Dred Scott, that alone would be enough to stain Taney’s tenure forever. But that decision built upon several previous Taney-era cases that laid the groundwork for the comprehensive dehumanization of Black people found in Dred Scott.
Fifteen years previously, the Taney Court had decided Prigg v. Pennsylvania. The majority overturned a Pennsylvania law prohibiting the extradition of Black people to other states to enslave them. The Court held the law was unconstitutional under Article IV, Section 2, the Fugitive Slave Clause. Only Congress, the Court said, could pass laws about the return of fugitives.
[...] Taney also mused that when new states formed, they had the right “to be admitted into the Union upon an equal footing with the old states.” The “old states” he’s talking about here are the original 13 states, which were able to choose to have slavery. Gotta give every new state a chance to become a slave state, for freedom.
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The Fuller Court
Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who helmed the Court from 1888 to 1910, was no slouch at ensuring the Court supplemented its commitment to racism with an equally fervent commitment to economic exploitation. The Fuller Court is responsible for the spiritual successor to Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson. Sure, the Fourteenth Amendment required equal treatment under the law, but Plessy upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate train cars for Black people anyway. State-mandated segregation was perfectly fine as long as things were separate but equal, giving official sanction to Jim Crow laws. [...] A significant project of the Fuller Court was ensuring “economic liberty” by striking down laws meant to protect workers under the guise of “freedom to contract.” 1905’s Lochner v. New York overturned a state law barring bakers from working over 60 hours per week or 10 hours per day. The central conceit of the opinion was that workers were just as harmed by the law because it restricted their ability to contract with their employer. This requires believing in the fiction that employees and employers have equal power and employees can easily negotiate the terms of their employment.
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The case for Roberts (derogatory)
In Roberts’s 20 years atop the Court, conservatives have rolled back the already meager protections for LGBTQ people, making sure to finish the most recent term by kicking trans kids in the teeth. Reproductive rights have been comprehensively gutted, from allowing private for-profit companies to invoke religion to refuse to provide birth control coverage to overturning the constitutional right to abortion. Also, racism is apparently completely fixed, so school desegregation and affirmative action had to go. So too did the core of the Voting Rights Act, letting Roberts fulfill his lifelong ambition of making it harder for Black people to vote.
There’s an obvious connection between the Fuller Court’s fiction that workers and employers have the same amount of power and the Roberts Court’s open and obvious goal of tilting the playing field toward employers. More workers are being forced to agree to arbitration, which strongly favors employers, and waive their right to bring class actions. Public sector unions are now barred from collecting fair share fees, undercutting their ability to bargain collectively. But don’t worry: per Justice Samuel Alito, that’s totally fine because of the “considerable windfall that unions have received.” Roberts spared America the tyranny of a requirement that agriculture companies allow labor organizers to come onto their property, saying that such a requirement was a “taking” by the government for which the employers needed to be compensated.
Current Chief Justice John Roberts is in the running for the worst SCOTUS Chief Justice of All-Time Award.
