Chief Justice John Roberts pushes for judicial independence in history-heavy report

Chief Justice John Roberts on May 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File) - Manuel Balce Ceneta/APChief Justice John Roberts touted the independence of the federal judiciary as a “counter-majoritarian check” and urged Americans rattled by partisan politics to keep faith with the Constitution in an annual report Wednesday that steered clear of direct discussion of modern controversies.Focusing on the Declaration of Independence as the nation turns to its 250th anniversary, Roberts said the founders chafed at the crown’s control of colonial courts and “corrected this flaw” by setting up a judiciary that would operate without interference from the other branches.“This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well,” Roberts wrote in the report, which was released by the Supreme Court hours before the start of the new year.Roberts’ history-heavy statement made no mention of President Donald Trump, nor the intense conflict that has cropped up between federal courts and the White House since his second inauguration nearly a year ago.Trump has questioned the legitimacy of courts that paused his policies and called for the impeachment of judges who ruled against him.Many of those cases have wound up on the Supreme Court’s emergency, or “shadow,” docket, where the president has often found a more receptive audience among the court’s six-justice conservative majority. Many of those decisions have overturned lower courts with little-to-no explanation, prompting sharp and unusual criticism from a few lower court judges and an open debate over the summer among a few of the justices themselves.The court has allowed the Trump administration in recent months to cancel foreign aid and public health funding; temporarily fire the leadership of many independent agencies; stop and interrogate people about their immigration status based on their apparent ethnicity, language or presence at a particular location; and require the sex designation on US passports to align with the holder’s biological sex. Last week, the court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard in Chicago.In all, the Supreme Court has sided with Trump this year in more than 80% of the emergency appeals filed by the Justice Department.The court, on its regular docket, handed the president an important win in June by limiting the power of federal courts to temporarily block his policies.In 2026, the justices are expected to decide whether Trump may end birthright citizenship through executive order, unilaterally impose sweeping global tariffs and dismiss a governor from the Federal Reserve based on disputed allegations of mortgage fraud.On the impeachment of judgesRoberts has long tended to avoid sensitive topics in his report, making no mention of ethics controversies that swirled around the Supreme Court for years, for instance. Last year, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, he lambasted threats to ignore federal court rulings as “dangerous.”Even by those standards, Wednesday’s report seemed especially cautious.Roberts has long made his advocacy for an independent judiciary clear. And while his message may be subtle and apolitical, there was little question that the chief justice — at least on that issue — was reflecting on current events.At one point, Roberts writes about the 1804 impeachment of Samuel Chase — the only Supreme Court justice to ever be impeached.Though Roberts describes Chase as “controversial and irascible,” it is also the case that his impeachment was wrapped up in a partisan power grab by President Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who wanted to weaken the Federalist grip on the judiciary.Chase was ultimately acquitted, Roberts noted in the report, “despite a supermajority of Democratic-Republicans in the Senate, because many senators concluded that disapproval of a judge’s decisions provided an invalid basis for removal from office.”Quoting from a book written by his predecessor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts said that the outcome of Chase’s impeachment “assured the independence of federal judges from congressional oversight of the decisions they made in the cases that came before them.”Roberts in March — at a moment when Trump’s rhetoric on impeaching federal judges had reached a zenith — issued a rare public statement stressing that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”In his closing words Wednesday, Roberts quoted President Calvin Coolidge as he spoke on the nation’s sesquicentennial a century ago. Amid the “clash of conflicting interests” and the “welter of partisan politics,” Coolidge said, Americans could find “solace and consolation” in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and confidence that their calls to freedom and justice would remain steady.“True then,” Roberts said. “True now.”For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com