John Roberts

• Born: January 27, 1955
• Place of Birth: Buffalo, New York

At the age of fifty, John Roberts became the youngest man ever to serve as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court on September 29, 2005. Nominated by President George W. Bush, Roberts was confirmed with an approval vote of 78 to 22. The saga of Roberts' nomination and confirmation reflected an intensifying battle of political and social positions in the United States that had begun to increasingly play out in the nation's highest court by the early 2000s.

Background

John Glover Roberts, Jr. was born on January 27, 1955, to John G. Roberts and Rosemary Podrasky. John Roberts, Sr., worked as an executive for industrial giant Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo, New York. During the 1960s, the family moved John, Jr. and his sisters, Kathy, Peggy, and Barbara, to the upper middle-class suburb of Long Beach, Indiana.

John Roberts, Jr. left home to attend a Catholic boarding school in LaPorte, Indiana. By all accounts, Roberts thrived at boarding school. As the captain of the football team, member of the student council member, co-editor of the newspaper, and dramatist, Roberts graduated first in his class. In 1973, he was accepted at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After only three years of study, Roberts graduated summa cum laude in 1976.

That fall, Roberts started law school at Harvard. By his third and final year of law school, he was serving as the managing editor for the law review. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1979.

Legal Career

From 1979 to 1980, Roberts clerked for 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Henry Friendly. He was then hired as a clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist (then an associate justice on the Court). A year later, in 1981, he was hired as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith. In 1982, he became associate counsel to President Ronald Reagan under White House Counsel Fred Fielding.

Roberts served as associate counsel for the White House for nearly four years. In 1986, however, he accepted a job in private practice with the Washington, D.C. firm of Hogan and Hartson. His departure was timely. By the end of 1986, Reagan's White House had been drawn into public debates and judicial action for its part in the Iran-Contra Affair.

At Hogan and Hartson, Roberts specialized in civil litigation, and particularly in cases before an appellate court. After three years of private practice, Roberts was called back to the White House to serve under President George H.W. Bush. As a member of the solicitor general's staff from 1989 to 1993, Roberts was responsible for representing the government in cases that had come before the Supreme Court. During his four years of service there, Roberts argued thirty-nine cases and won twenty-five of them.

In 1992, Bush nominated Roberts to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia circuit. Bush, however, was struggling in a presidential campaign against Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The Senate allowed Roberts' nomination to lapse without a vote, and Roberts returned to Hogan and Hartson.

Back in private practice, Roberts was named a partner of the large Washington, D.C. firm and was made head of its appellate practice. Roberts also became an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Law Center.

Court of Appeals

In 2000, George W. Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush, began his first term in office. With an approach to policy and staffing very similar to that of his father, Bush recalled to the White House a number of those who had worked for or with the first Bush administration. In a flurry of judicial nominations, Bush nominated Roberts to the Court of Appeals a second time. However, the country had become too thoroughly divided in its politics, with a greater emphasis on judicial nominees, to allow for an easy approval process. Thirty of Bush's judicial nominees, including Roberts, failed to get confirmation by the Senate. Roberts remained at Hogan and Hartson for three more years.

In January 2003, Bush again nominated Roberts to the Court of Appeals, this time to replace a retiring judge. Roberts' nomination got through the Judiciary Committee with a vote of 16-3, but won unanimous approval in the Republican-controlled Senate. Roberts began serving on the Court of Appeals on June 3, 2003.

Roberts remained on the Court of Appeals for only three years. On July 1, 2005, Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced that she was resigning her position on the Court effective as soon as her successor could be nominated and confirmed. O'Connor's resignation stirred up the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats that have become a familiar part of the judicial nominations process. As a moderate judge whose vote was often the decisive factor in a court otherwise divided between conservative and liberal judicial positions, O'Connor was crucial to the balance of power. Both sides felt that there was a tremendous amount at stake in filling O'Connor's seat.

Supreme Court Nomination and Career

When Bush nominated Roberts to fill O'Connor's seat on July 19, 2005, a storm of controversy broke out. Since Roberts spent most of his career as an attorney before the appellate courts, there was very little public record of his own views on the nation's most debated issues. However, some interpreted his active Catholicism and remarks on the Supreme Court abortion decision Roe v. Wade (1973) to suggest that he would overturn that case if given the opportunity.

Decided in 1973, Roe v. Wade prohibited states from banning first-term abortions. O'Connor's decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey had opened the door for more state regulation of early stage pregnancies, but had reaffirmed a woman's right to first trimester abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment. The longstanding alliance between the Republican Party and anti-abortion groups on the one hand, and between the Democratic Party and advocates for the reproductive rights of women on the other meant that Roberts' ambiguous position on Roe v. Wade was central to discussions of his fitness for the Supreme Court.

Of equal concern was how Roberts' appointment to the Supreme Court would affect the existing balances of power between Congress, the executive branch, the judiciary, and the states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution, for instance, authorizes Congress to make laws with regard to any issues that affect interstate commerce, or business that moves across state borders. In the contemporary United States, this clause authorizes federal legislation of everything from environmental protection to highways and phone services to criminal racketeering.

Roberts' dissent in the case of Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton while he was on the Court of Appeals indicated that he believes the Commerce Clause should be interpreted more narrowly than it has been. Liberal organizations point to the Rancho Viejo dissent, along with Roberts' affiliation with strongly conservative groups like the National Legal Center for the Public Interest and the Republican National Lawyers' Association, to argue that Roberts would attempt to radically limit the powers of Congress over a myriad of interstate issues.

On September 3, 2005, with Roberts' confirmation hearings looming, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died suddenly. President Bush quickly withdrew Roberts' nomination for associate justice and nominated him for chief justice on September 6, 2005. Roberts' nomination was approved before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 22 in a 13-5 vote. He was confirmed by the full Senate on September 29, 2005, in a vote of 78-22. Roberts was sworn in as the seventeenth chief justice of the Supreme Court that day. Some of his more prominent votes as chief justice include a 2012 vote to uphold the mandate in President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) that states citizens are required to purchase health care or pay a tax; a 2015 vote to reaffirm the legality of Obamacare based on King v. Burnwell; and a 2015 vote against the Supreme Court's ruling to legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states.

On January 16, 2020, Robert's became the presiding officer over the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, who was charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress; the Senate ultimately voted to acquit Trump in February 2020. In February 2021, Roberts declined to serve as the presiding officer for Trump's second impeachment trial, in which the former president was also acquitted.

In the early 2020s, the Court, which by that point had acquired a more conservative makeup, continued to hear a number of prominent cases, issuing rulings more favorable to conservatives in a number of instances. For example, in late 2021, the Court refused to block a Texas law known as the "Heartbeat Bill," which banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and enacted other restrictions. While Roberts felt the Texas law violated the abortion rights established in Roe v. Wade, the court's majority opinion only allowed abortion providers with a narrow legal path to continue challenging the new restrictions.

Throughout 2022, the Court continued to grapple with the issue of abortion. At the end of June 2022, the court issued a landmark decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and established that the Constitution did not confer a federal right to abortion. While Roberts joined the Court's other conservative justices in their 6–3 decision, his attempts to find a more moderate approach to addressing the case proved unsuccessful. In 2023, Roberts authored the majority opinion that overturned race-based admissions programs in colleges and universities.

Roberts and his wife, lawyer Jane Sullivan Roberts, have two children, Josephine and Jack.

Bibliography

Barnes, Robert, and Ann E. Marimow. "With Stakes Beyond Task at Hand, John Roberts Takes Central Role in Trump's Impeachment Trial." The Washington Post, 16 Jan. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts‗law/with-pledge-to-do-impartial-justice-john-roberts-takes-central-role-in-trumps-impeachment-trial/2020/01/16/93dcfbec-37d8-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754‗story.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Biskupic, Joan. “John Roberts Doesn’t Want Race to Matter As He Ends Affirmative Action for College Admission Programs." CNN, 29 June 2023, www.cnn.com/2023/06/29/politics/john-roberts-affirmative-action-race/index.html.  Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

CNN Editorial Research. "John Roberts Fast Facts." CNN, 24 Jan. 2024, www.cnn.com/2013/03/25/us/john-g-roberts-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

"Current Members." Supreme Court of the United States, www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Liptak, Adam. "June 24, 2022: The Day Chief Justice Roberts Lost His Court." The New York Times, 24 June 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/us/abortion-supreme-court-roberts.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.