Dead Patriots Society

(Reprinted from the Boulder Daily Camera. August 15, 2026)

Sadly, no one has done more to enable Trump’s assault on our democracy than Chief Justice John Roberts.

I will briefly discuss four cases: Trump v. United States, Trump v. Slaughter, Louisiana v. Callais, and Mullin v. Doe. The first came down in the summer of 2024; the rest were decided this year.

In Trump v. United States, Roberts wrote for the majority that “the system of separated powers designed by the Framers has always demanded an energetic, independent Executive,” undeterred by the prospect of criminal prosecution for his actions in office.

The Constitution makes no mention of presidential immunity. And in the Impeachment Judgment Clause (Art I, Sect. 3, Cl. 7), one who is removed from office may subsequently be prosecuted and punished “according to law.”

President Ford’s pardon of Nixon assumed no presidential immunity. And as Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in her dissent, Trump’s own lawyers during his second impeachment trial “insisted that a former President ‘is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.’”

Undaunted, our champion of the “unitary executive” theory reasons that some degree of presidential immunity is implicit in the separation of powers. (Since there is no mention of immunity in the Impeachment Judgment Clause, Roberts reasons — in effect — that we can’t infer much from it.) For acts within the president’s exclusive authority, immunity must be absolute. For all other “official acts,” the president enjoys “presumptive immunity,” with the burden on the Government to demonstrate that a prosecution would pose no “danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”

This decision surely emboldened a man with no regard for the law to begin with.

Trump v. Slaughter, in which Roberts also wrote the majority opinion, is similarly fast and loose with the Constitution, history and precedent. This case concerned “independent” agencies established by Congress, with “for-cause” removal protection to insulate them from partisan politics. Roberts argued that such agencies, tasked with some executive functions, also violated the separation of powers, which vests executive power in the President.

Roberts seemingly misrepresents founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who maintained that there must be some blending of power between the three branches for them to check each other and maintain any separation of power.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch raises the concern that in granting to the president “at-will” removal power of members of these agencies, the Court has significantly expanded the power of the Executive, which was not the intent of Congress.

By Roberts’ own standard, his opinions in these two cases are amateurish.

What is Roberts’ own standard? His opinion in the 2023 Alabama redistricting case, Allen v. Milligan, will do. Ironically, that may be the best defense of the 1982 amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act I have read, which prohibited voting schemes by States, including districting voting maps, that effectively discriminate against racial minorities, regardless of intent. Roberts abandoned that position three years later to join Alito’s convoluted opinion in Louisiana v. Callais. (Even worse was what followed the Louisiana decision: the Court’s 2026 unsigned order granting a stay in Allen v. Milligan. Had the author of that order bothered to read the appealed decision by the District Court, which bent over backwards to comply with the Louisiana ruling?)

Roberts’ 2023 decision in Allen is crystal-clear writing; Alito’s decision in Louisiana is anything but clear. (For Allen 2023 and Allen 2026, go to: trumptimes.blog.)

Of course, John Roberts opposed the 1982 amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act from the beginning. But that is not at all evident in his exemplary 2023 opinion in Allen.

As for Mullin v Doe, in which the Court determined in part that race was not a factor in the ending of Temporary Protection Status for Haitians, and therefore the administration did not violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Kavanaugh overlooked patently racist statements by Trump. In 896 words, Alito talked all around the subject and concluded none were “overtly racial,” but never quoted any of them. Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, spelled it all out in 135 words.

So much for defending the Constitution.