Reign SUPREME

Chief Justice John Roberts insists he’s taken the reins of the Supreme Court. But the institution may be too far gone

- Cristian Farias

JOHN ROBERTS ONCE told the story of how one of his role models, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, succeeded in steering the Supreme Court of the United States, at the time “the most unpopular institution in the country,” through one of the gravest threats to its independence yet: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s controversial proposal to pack it with up to 15 justices.

The reason for this clash of titans was the court’s conservatives’ refusal, often by a razor-thin majority of five, to go along with the president and Congress’s efforts to get the nation out of the Great Depression—by striking down popular policies and programs that were designed to lift people out of poverty and put them on a path to progress. In the end, Roosevelt lost the battle. But in Roberts’s telling, Hughes played a starring role, writing a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that helped bring about a détente. “It fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington,” Roberts told an audience in 2015.

Roberts is no Hughes. But if his actions and inactions in the past year, amid a very real crisis of confidence at the high court, are any indication, he wants the public to know that he’s in charge. Don’t believe the headlines on CNN or The New York Times or Politico proclaiming that he’s lost control of the Supreme Court. Under his watch and steady hand, things at the Supreme Court—which in his 18 years as chief justice has transformed American law beyond conservatives’ wildest dreams—are just fine.