It was reported by ConservativeBrief that Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual year-end report to push back against what he sees as increasingly “inappropriate political influence” being used in an attempt to sway the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on high-profile cases.
Constitutional scholars will tell you that our founders chose to have federal judges and Supreme Court justices serve lifetime appointments as a way to ensure they could rise above the political fray as administrations and successive congresses changed hands.
But somewhere along the way throughout our history, politicians and presidents discovered that they could permanently influence the country by choosing judges and justices who shared their political and cultural ideologies. The process of nominating judges and justices, thus, became very political.
And today, no matter how much some justices and judges protest that reality, it is still true: Presidents do not nominate jurists who do not share their political views, and the Senate typically does not confirm judges who don’t align with their party’s ideologies.
And as such, now the process has become so overtly political it has alarmed Roberts and other federal court watchers who know that the supposed independence of the Judicial Branch is at risk of becoming a policy enforcement wing of the current party in charge and that threats from outside political forces can serve as a means to ensure a ‘correct’ ruling.
“Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence,” Roberts, who serves as head of the entire federal judiciary, noted in his report on the status of SCOTUS and the 107 federal district and appeals courts around the nation.
Roberts noted another area of importance: “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”
