The conservative Chief isn’t going to let Trumpy judges tear everything up at once.
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts signaled, for the second time in less than two weeks, that he’s not going to let overeager conservative judges willfully ignore the Supreme Court’s precedents — even if Roberts himself disagrees with those precedents.
The first such signal came 12 days ago, when Roberts unexpectedly voted with his liberal colleagues to temporarily halt a Louisiana anti-abortion law that is nearly identical to a Texas law his court struck down in 2016. Roberts is a conservative George W. Bush appointee who typically votes against abortion rights. He joined the dissent in the 2016 Texas case.
Roberts’ second signal to the judiciary’s right flank came in Moore v. Texas, the second case of that name to reach the Supreme Court. Both Moore cases involve Bobby James Moore, a Texas man sentenced to die despite the fact that he is almost certainly intellectually disabled. Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which used a term for the intellectually disabled that is now considered deeply offensive, “death is not a suitable punishment for a mentally retarded criminal.”
View the complete February 19 article by Ian Millhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.