openpolitics.com

To the extent that the presidential campaign focused on the Supreme Court with any specificity, the attention was on abortion, religion, gay rights, guns and other familiar issues on the social agenda. But going forward, the Roberts court may find the most pressing issues on its docket to concern core questions of civil liberties and the separation of powers.

 .. When the president, aided by his inner circle and his congressional enablers, pushes through some norm-shattering order, wipes away duly promulgated regulations with the flourish of a pen or drives a truck through the wall between church and state, where will the Roberts court be? (And where will Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, the appeals court judge Neil M. Gorsuch, be?)

It’s hard to imagine two figures on the current public stage less alike than the button-down chief justice and the flamboyant president.

.. Watching Chief Justice Roberts administer the oath to Donald Trump, what struck me was the unlikelihood that these two men would even be sharing the same stage — and not only because during the campaign, Mr. Trump called the chief justice “an absolute disaster” for his votes to preserve the Affordable Care Act.

If Donald Trump is the in-your-face chief executive, John Roberts has perfected the art of being the nearly invisible chief justice. He can be tough on the bench during arguments and in the justices’ private conference as well, but in public he exudes a self-deprecating diffidence.

.. The chief justice, a strategic thinker with exemplary work habits, is every bit a match for the president. He is a very good lawyer with very conservative instincts, and his own long-range game plan includes getting the government out of the business of taking account of race, even for the purpose of protecting voting rights or preserving the hard-won gains of integration.

.. The question now is to what extent he is willing to lead his court in standing up against a president who, it is hardly far-fetched to imagine, may trample the First Amendment, withhold information the law regards as subject to disclosure, or defy court orders on immigration or other matters.

.. Chief Justice Roberts signed a hyperbolic dissenting opinion by Justice Scalia that opened with “America is at war with radical Islamists” and went on to warn that the decision “will almost certainly cause Americans to be killed.” Perhaps more to the present point, the chief justice also filed a dissenting opinion of his own, in which he asked rhetorically who had won the case. The answer, he said, was “certainly not the American people, who today lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

.. Robert Post and Reva Siegel, maintained that rather than ask nominees how they would decide current or future cases — questions that nominees properly refuse to answer — senators should ask how they would have decided past Supreme Court cases.