Roberts warns against ignoring Supreme Court rulings as tension with Trump looms

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts slammed what he described as “dangerous” talk by some officials about ignoring federal court rulings, using an annual report weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office to stress the importance of an independent judiciary.

Officials “from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings,” Roberts wrote in the report, released by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

The chief justice didn’t detail which officials he had in mind – and both Republicans and Democrats have hinted at ignoring court rulings in recent years. Still, Roberts’ year-end message landed days before the January 20 inauguration of a president who has repeatedly decried the federal judiciary as rigged.

Trump’s agenda – particularly on immigration – could put the incoming president on a collision course next year with a Supreme Court he has helped to build by naming three conservative justices during his first term.

“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system – sometimes in cases with major ramifications,” Roberts wrote. And yet, he added, “for the past several decades,” both parties have respected court decisions and have headed off the kind of constitutional confrontations that arose during the civil rights era when some southern states declined court orders to integrate.

Roberts, in particular, pointed to decisions by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to enforce school desegregation rulings. In 1957, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to integrate its schools after officials sought to defy Supreme Court decisions that found segregated schools unconstitutional.

Roberts lamented that “public officials,” whom he also did not name, had “regrettably” attempted to intimidate judges by “suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.” Those attempts, he warned, are “inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”

As in past years, the chief justice avoided direct mention of the controversies and challenges brewing within the Supreme Court itself – including lingering questions about ethics, a weekslong scandal this year over controversial flags hoisted at Justice Samuel Alito’s properties and sagging public confidence in the nation’s highest court.

In a series of interviews before the election, Vice President-elect JD Vance raised doubts about his fidelity to Supreme Court decisions. In a 2021 podcast, as The New York Times previously reported, Vance urged Trump to respond to adverse court rulings “like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

The likely apocryphal quote came in response to an 1832 decision Jackson opposed that dealt with Native Americans.

Trump himself has often blasted federal courts – including the Supreme Court – over adverse decisions. A spokesman for Trump’s campaign earlier this week slammed the “political weaponization of our justice system” in a response to a federal appeals court ruling in New York that upheld a jury’s verdict finding that the former president sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll.

Democrats, too, have toyed publicly with declining to enforce court decisions. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew criticism last year for suggesting on CNN that the Biden administration “ignore” a district court decision that would have halted Food and Drug Administration of the abortion pill mifepristone. The Supreme Court paused that decision and, in June, tossed the lawsuit challenging wider access to the drug.

Roberts has repeatedly used his year-end report to tout the importance of an independent judiciary and to sound an alarm about threats of violence against judges. Two years ago, in a similar vein, he stressed that “a judicial system cannot and should not live in fear.”

In this year’s report, Roberts added that “hostile foreign state actors” had accelerated attacks on the judiciary and other branches. In some instances, he said, “bots distort judicial decisions, using fake or exaggerated narratives to foment discord within our democracy.”

The report lands at the end of a year in which the conservative 6-3 majority granted former presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution – and on a timeline that allowed Trump to avoid a trial on federal charges in two cases before the November election. This fall, the court is delving into transgender care bans and a First Amendment challenge to a bipartisan ban on TikTok.

“The role of the judicial branch,” Roberts wrote, is “to say what the law is.”

But, he added, “judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”

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