How John Roberts exhibited his power in the Supreme Court’s biggest decisions

The Supreme Court is still the John Roberts court, a fact underscored by the chief justice’s influence on the biggest cases of the most recent term.

Roberts at times allowed the court’s 6-3 conservative majority to flex its muscle in gutting affirmative action, blocking student debt relief and allowing a website designer to refuse to make same-sex wedding websites.

In several other major cases, Roberts kept the court from embracing sweeping legal positions, breaking with some of his most conservative colleagues to strike down Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map and reject a fringe legal theory that would have handed near-total authority to state legislatures in setting federal election rules.

Court watchers said Roberts’s alignment is not a reflection of his role as chief justice, and instead shows his prominence in the ideological middle of the high court.

“I don’t really think he has control over his colleagues,” said Adam Unikowsky, a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia who practices before the court. 

“I think he’s close to the middle of the court, and in most cases, the middle of the court will be in the majority, and that’s true in almost every case this year,” Unikowsky added. “But I don’t really feel like he exercised much influence on his colleagues beyond the vote that he has.”

Roberts was in the majority 95 percent of the time this term, according to Empirical SCOTUS. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative seen as part of the court’s ideological middle, surpassed the chief justice, voting with the majority 96 percent of the time.

In multiple major decisions, the duo showed a willingness to not go as far as their conservative colleagues. Kavanaugh and Roberts voted together 95 percent of the time this term, tying as the most agreeable pair of justices, the group found.

And when the duo broke at times with the other conservatives, it gave the three liberals the majority.

In the dispute over Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, a three-judge district court panel struck it down as a racial gerrymander that likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, ordering the state to draw new lines that included a second majority-Black district.

Expectations ran high that the Supreme Court would reverse that decision, and by doing so, narrow the Voting Rights Act.

But Roberts and Kavanaugh — over the dissents of their four more conservative colleagues — ultimately sided with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson to strike down the Republican-drawn map.

“Those are important counterpoints to the cases at the end, affirmative action, the website with same-sex couples and student loans,” said Unikowsky. “So it’s not all one-sided. I mean, obviously, the latter three cases are very significant. But you can see a court willing to go both ways.”

Roberts wrote for the 5-4 majority that “the heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew,” referring to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who closely follows the court, said “the litigants were way overshooting” in the case.

“For the court to reject or partially reject their claims, I don’t see as moderation,” he said. “I just see it as normal in the Alabama case.”

Roberts’s next majority opinion also rejected a sweeping Republican-promoted election law theory.

Joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee, Roberts, Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices rejected the maximalist argument known as the “independent state legislature” theory, declining to hand near-total authority to state legislatures in drawing congressional maps and setting federal election rules.

Roberts’s opinion preserved the role of state courts in adjudicating federal election rules. But he also caveated, writing that “state courts do not have free rein.”

“In the independent state legislature case, I actually don’t even really see it as normal,” said Schwinn. “The court did reject the most aggressive form of the independent state legislature theory, but it still left a possibility that the independent state legislature theory could have an impact on our politics and elections.”

In the final days of the term, the conservative majority threw away any remaining doubts as to their strength, handing down three major decisions that fell along ideological lines.

The court ruled that a website designer had a free speech right to refuse to design same-sex wedding websites, affirmative action in college admissions was unconstitutional and the Biden administration could not implement its student debt relief plan.

Roberts authored the majority opinion in the latter two cases, stopping debt relief for more than 40 million student borrowers and effectively putting the nail in the coffin for race-conscious admissions policies.

The chief’s decision to write the affirmative action decision, which struck down admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, came with little surprise because Roberts has lamented racial classifications for years.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote in a 2007 case involving a public school district’s use of race to assign students to schools.

Schwinn called the Harvard decision an “ultimate victory” for the chief justice.

“I see this ruling as a capstone to the effort to read the Equal Protection Clause as a colorblind command in the Constitution,” he said.