Chief Justice John Roberts told a room of lawyers at a legal conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that many Americans have the Supreme Court wrong. People, he said, see the justices as “political actors.” “I don’t think that is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts added, explaining that the Court’s work is “based on our best effort to figure out what the Constitution means and how it applies.”
Roberts did not address any specific cases. He also did not mention President Trump.
That is a sturdy claim. It is also a revealing one, because it forces us into a harder question the Constitution itself never neatly answers.
What, exactly, is the Supreme Court supposed to be?
Join the Discussion
Start with the text: Article III is spare
Most Americans talk about the Supreme Court as if the Constitution laid out its job description in bold print. It did not.
Article III creates “one supreme Court,” but it leaves the details remarkably thin. The Constitution tells us:
- Judicial power extends to certain categories of cases and controversies.
- Justices hold office during “good Behaviour,” which in practice means life tenure unless impeached and removed.
- The Court’s original jurisdiction is limited, and its appellate jurisdiction exists “with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
That is not a full blueprint. It is a framework. The rest is architecture built over time by Congress, by the Court itself, and by political norms that can weaken when pressure rises.
Where “above politics” comes from
Not from the text alone. The idea of a neutral judiciary is partly aspiration and partly institutional design.
The design features are real. Life tenure and protected salaries are meant to insulate judges from retaliation. Federal judges do not run for office. They do not need to fundraise. They do not need to please a district of voters every few years.
But insulation is not the same thing as purity. The Constitution also ties the Court to politics in plain sight:
- Presidents nominate justices.
- The Senate confirms them or blocks them.
- Congress controls the Court’s size, budget, and much of its jurisdiction.
If you built a branch that depends on elected officials for staffing and structural rules, you did not build a branch that floats outside politics. You built a branch that is buffered from some political forces, not immune from all of them.
What Roberts is defending
When Roberts rejects the idea that justices choose outcomes based on policy preferences rather than legal analysis, he is defending the Court’s core currency: legitimacy.
The Supreme Court has no army. It has no power of the purse. Its authority rests on something more delicate: broad public acceptance that its judgments are law, even when those judgments sting.
Roberts acknowledged that people are free to criticize the Court. But he urged that criticism be aimed at decisions rather than at judges as individuals, warning that personal attacks are “not appropriate” and can lead to “very serious problems.” That warning is not abstract. It reflects the reality that judicial security has become a more visible concern in recent years.
In other words: Roberts is not just arguing about image. He is arguing about the preconditions for the Court to function at all.
Analysis: not “political” is not “not consequential”
Beyond Roberts’ remarks, the larger structural problem is easy to miss. Even if every justice acted in perfect good faith, the Court would still land in the middle of politics, because constitutional cases are often fights about power and identity.
Roberts sits on a Court with a 6-3 conservative majority, and recent terms have moved federal law sharply rightward on issues like abortion, guns, and voting rights. Those topics are not “political” because the justices made them political. They are political because the country is divided and because the Constitution leaves room for interpretation in areas where Americans demand certainty.
This is the point many people miss: the Court can be doing legal analysis and still shape national policy. That is not necessarily corruption. That is the nature of constitutional adjudication in a system where the Constitution is both law and the rulebook for power.
What legitimacy takes
The Constitution does not say, “The Supreme Court shall be trusted.” Trust has to be earned and re-earned. How?
1) Explanation
Opinions are not just outcomes. They are a public accounting. When the reasoning is thin, selective, or openly partisan in tone, legitimacy drains away faster than any press office can repair.
2) Consistency over time
The Court can change its mind. It has, many times. But sudden pivots without persuasive justification invite the conclusion that law is just politics wearing a robe.
3) Restraint where restraint is plausible
Article III does not spell out a simple rule that the Court should settle every national argument simply because it can. The Court’s most sustainable power comes when it decides what it must, explains what it does, and resists the temptation to do more than the case truly requires.
4) A public that criticizes like citizens
Roberts’s plea to focus criticism on decisions instead of demonizing judges is not a demand for silence. It is a demand for civic maturity. A republic cannot hold courts accountable if the only language it knows is contempt.
The question a sound bite cannot cover
If justices are not “political actors,” what are they?
The Constitution suggests a complicated answer: they are legal actors appointed through politics, insulated from some political pressures, deciding disputes that are often political in consequence, and relying on legitimacy that is partly legal and partly cultural.
That sounds messy because it is messy. The Court’s legitimacy is not a trophy you win once. It is a balance you keep, case by case, term by term, under conditions the Framers could not fully predict.
So yes, take Roberts seriously when he insists the justices are doing their “best effort” to read the Constitution faithfully. But do not stop there. Ask the tougher constitutional question: What happens when a country stops believing that “best effort” is real?