Surely Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. feels that he finally caught his proverbial whale after his recent statement targeting President Trump. In it, he admonished the president in all but name for floating the impeachment of federal Judge James Boasberg (in response to a ruling). Judge Boasberg is hearing the case of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members deported from the country. Roberts’ curt lines had the quality of a spoken-in-the-mirror comeback line the bookworm dreams of giving to the jock. Sometimes it only sounds clever to the person who said it.

Roberts pontificated about “established” practice and of a “appropriate response,” and emphasized the “normal appellate review process.” Sane sounding and seemingly substantive, yet fatuous words in the end. Like Captain Ahab's “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad,” Roberts’ motives are ill-conceived, inconsistent, and ultimately self-defeating. Is he chasing the president or adulation? Did a public rebuke, in proximity to a case likely to come in due course before his own court, help Roberts catch the whale? Or did it only relight the embers in the Chief Justice’s own signal fire seeking the public’s acceptance of the Supreme Court? Ask Justice Clarence Thomas if broad acceptance will ever come to him, nearly 34 years into his distinguished tenure. Popularity for the courts is not something that can simply be caught and stored.

As with many taken in by the waves from President Trump’s maneuvers in the past decade, Roberts find himself overcorrecting and thus overplaying his own effectiveness. The Chief Justice of the United States wishes to be the lighthouse for a calm nonpolitical judiciary, but he then jumps headfirst into the rough sea of political debate.

The further irony is that the Chief Justice has long been a proponent of expanding free speech and free expression in many landmark decisions on the Supreme Court. Indeed, at a talk in 2019 with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Roberts said “It doesn’t bother me in the least that our opinions are criticized. They should be when people think they are wrong.” What exactly has happened to the Chief Justice?

Roberts surely knows that when those in government authority employ such loaded phrases as “established” and “appropriate,” it may very well be code to sit down, listen and know one’s place. It is the Chief Justice who seems to have forgotten the people’s place, which the president’s prerogative robustly seeks to accommodate.

The Chief Justice’s insatiable quest for public approval is one which may, like the tormented Ahab, lead him to snare his own pomposity in the whale’s throes. John Roberts’ hubris would be well-served to heed Joan of Arc’s warning in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1: “Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceases to enlarge itself, till by broadly spreading, it disperses to naught.” The legitimacy of the federal courts will be naught if measured solely in popularity, real or perceived. It is instead proper to measure it in principled courage.

Alan Loncar is an attorney in Macomb County, Michigan.

Image: Public Domain