John Roberts, chief for 20 years, starts another new term -- with Trump, again, the main character

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : Nonetheless, the court he has presided over has dictated major shifts in the law on gun rights, affirmative action, voting rights and abortion, usually with his endorsement.
61% : " Did Roberts' immunity ruling embolden Trump? While Roberts has publicly cautioned against defiance of the court, many of the chief justice's critics and even some allies say his July 2024 ruling on presidential immunity wound up emboldening Trump.
59% : "The problem is he's lost control of the court," Gertner said.
53% : We're in the 20th year of the Roberts court and there are two branches of government, not three.
50% : What's more, many legal experts say, Roberts has actually emboldened Trump.
50% : When Roberts and the other eight justices return to the bench Monday after a busy summer recess, they will begin a term that will again be focused on Trump.
50% : The decision stemmed from the federal prosecution of Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
50% : "I'm immune from all of the stuff that they charged me with," Trump declared the following month, eliding much of the nuance in the decision.
50% : Weeks after Trump was sworn in for a second time, he posted on social media: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.
50% : "I think when this chapter is written, that the name Roberts will be side by side with the name Trump when it comes to what led to the degradation of our democracy.
50% : The judge said Roberts seemed to view the decision as an interim one that the court would revisit, although the issue became largely moot after Trump won the presidency again and the Justice Department dropped the criminal case related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
50% : "The court could have been motivated by that, not just by the prosecutions of Trump.
50% : Roberts also joined the liberals in a 5-4 ruling the previous year that handed Trump a loss on his effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
50% : However, Roberts' Republican-appointed colleagues insisted on toppling Roe. "He prefers opinions, where possible, that have smaller ramifications," William and Mary Law Professor Jonathan Adler said.
50% : Roberts' stated penchant for incrementalism often seems out of place in an era of extreme political polarization, although it still sometimes carries the day on the more mundane cases the court takes up.
43% : " Some legal experts said they think that, when the decision was being written last year, Roberts was expecting Biden to win the election, and the chief justice was trying to shut down the criminal charges that Justice Department special prosecutors and a Georgia district attorney had filed against Trump.
43% : Roberts' diminished power was most evident in the court's 2022 decision overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years.
42% : " Roberts and his court have occasionally checked Trump While the Supreme Court has leaned strongly in Trump's direction thus far during his second term, the president has not run the table.
41% : Yet, eight months into Trump's presidency and with the court's new term opening Monday, the flurry of extraordinarily aggressive executive actions Trump has taken has met very little resistance from the Supreme Court.
40% : "Trump was, at that time, threatening that if he got into office, he would prosecute Biden," said American University law professor Stephern Wermiel, a Supreme Court historian.
38% : But critics say the court he oversees is doing little to rein in a president targeting political opponents for criminal prosecution, eliminating hundreds of thousands of federal workers without congressional input, and using funding halts to intimidate the country's top universities.
38% : So far this year, Trump has enjoyed an impressive winning streak in a series of emergency appeals to the high court involving administration policies.
38% : Less than two weeks later, the justices blocked a second wave of Alien Enemies Act deportations attempted by the administration.
38% : While the justices watered down the lower court's order, their insistence that the Trump administration "facilitate" Abrego's return to the U.S., clearly irritated Trump and other administration officials, who suggested publicly they would defy the high court's directive.
34% : However, Roberts' ability to control the outcome of a case by joining the court's liberals ended when liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020 and Trump cemented a six-justice conservative majority by winning confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
27% : Others speculate that Roberts may have been anticipating a Trump victory and was seeking to head off the prospect of Trump launching a prosecution of Biden.

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