A Sunday Reid: John Roberts' corrupt, neoconfederate court is solidifying 'Don Crow'
Chief Justice Roberts is repealing the 20th century to protect the corruption of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and his own conservative majority
On the day they released their decision in Louisiana vs. Callais, ripping the remaining guts out of the Voting Rights Act which some among them had previously hobbled, the six neoconfederates on the Supreme Court threw on their fanciest fits and went to dinner at the White House. The occasion: aspiring monarch Donald Trump’s state dinner for an actual king: the great great great great grandson of the mad, bethroned Briton who lost the colonies in a war in 1776. Charles had brought his second wife with him to America to commemorate Britain’s and our 250th divorce anniversary (oh, the “mistress wins the crown” stories Camilla and Melania must have shared!) So why not celebrate with the king in fact and the king the high court made.
After all, they had much to celebrate together. Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts and his fellow hands of the king, Donald Trump is living his dream; remaking the Capitol as an ode to himself, with his glowering visage staring down on visitors to Washington, his name slapped onto the John F. Kennedy Center and the Board of Peace building, and the White House remade into a Trumpian castle, festooned with gold leaf everywhere his Temu designers could find wall space. He has gathered around him a court full of white jesters “from central casting,” hired for their sycophancy and personal fealty to him rather than for their intelligence or ability, while unleashing his ministers of injustice to drag any man or woman deemed his enemy into court to face trial. He’s pushing to plaster his name and likeness on everything from U.S. currency to U.S. passports and seemingly everything in between. He “joked” that at one point he even considered renaming the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of Trump.” Except I don’t think he was joking.
Oh and let’s not forget the $400 million, 90,000 square foot ballroom to be built on the ruins of the East Wing, now at taxpayer expense, apparently, plus the “Arc du Trump” which The Donald has bragged will literally be an ode not to America but to himself.
The man who longs to be crowned King Donald the First is displaying many of the ills of Mad King George III, and not just in his rambling, shambling and incoherent bluster. He openly flouts every right his citizens thought they enjoyed, while using the office of president to garishly enrich himself, his family and his friends. He has without a second thought, made Justice Sotomayor’s nightmares, spelled out in her withering dissent in Trump vs. The United States come painfully true (though he hasn’t used Seal Team Six to kill any American … yet.) Trump and his regime accept no right of free speech other than to praise him. He even has his own secret police and his Epstein-tainted tech oligarch friends are rapidly erecting a nightmarish total surveillance state that might have made King George himself blush. Agency by agency, the Trump regime is rapidly returning the nation to what it was before all of that messiness with the Crown — a land of wealthy white male oligarchs who answer to no one but themselves, and who observe no law except the law of amassing more wealth, while the Blacks, the women and the immigrants are stripped of every position in public life.
This is the world John Roberts has made.
A Confederate Yankee in King Donald’s court
John Glover Roberts Jr., of Buffalo, New York, then Harvard, Indiana and Washington D.C., has apparently dreamed of repealing the enforcing legislation that belatedly activated the 15th Amendment for millions of Black Americans 100 years later, since he was a junior birdman in the Reagan “Justice” Department. He seems to have always viewed the Voting Rights Act as an affront to the good name of the American South and its white rulers, despite joining the Reagan DOJ as a 26-year-old conservative just sixteen years after the Voting Rights Act’s passage — hardly enough time to reverse 116 years of denying the majority of descendants of the enslaved their hard-earned right to choose the people making the laws applied to them. And he added to his apparent loathing of affirmative action to make room for Black suffrage and Black elected officials a firm belief that the in his mind imagined racism that built Jim Crow abruptly died with the election of Barack Obama as president. It was that “ditch your umbrella in the rain” logic that he poured into the 2013 ruling in Shelby vs. Holder, pinning the surname of the Black Obama-era attorney general to his ongoing project to dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s finest work.
Fast forward to a sunny April day in Washington on April 28, 2026. Chief Justice Roberts arrived at the White House alongside his high powered attorney wife and his five fellow Leonard Leo appointees to our thoroughly corrupted High Court to clink glasses with the well heeled. And despite his repeated insistence that he and his fellow justices … golly gee … never wanted to appear to be playing for one political side or the other … balls and strikes, you know … three of his colleagues were quite notably not in attendance.
The absence of the Democratic president-appointed liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson made news, including in the New York Times, and some have inferred a kind of boycott, with the three perhaps declining to attend out of umbrage. After all, that day was “release the Destroy the Voting Rights Act decision day.” Well, I can report from sources close to the process that this was not the case. None of the three liberal justices were invited, and so their exclusion from the state dinner was quite deliberately curated by the White House.
For Donald Trump, the Charles and Camilla state dinner was not just a chance to live out his dream of hobnobbing with the British royals he has so long obsessed over, it was a chance to surround himself with the winners of his looting lottery. Indeed, perusing the guest list is like leafing through a annals of American corruption and oligarchy.
Chief Justice Roberts arrived with his wife Jane, who between 2007 — two years after her husband became chief justice — and 2014, enriched herself by more than $10 million in commission fees while working at the recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, according to a whistleblower complaint by a former colleague, Kendal Price. According to Forbes, Mr. Price “submitted the complaint to Congress in December” of 2022, “arguing Roberts’ immense commission payments—reportedly at the high end for what even top legal recruiters earn—were largely due to her husband’s role as chief justice.” Imagine how much more cash she has raked into the family coffers since then, as the chief justice has given big business and the Christian* nationalist right nearly everything they’ve wished for, for decades. Per Forbes, the House and Senate Judiciary committees have been in possession of Price’s complaint since 2023.
Also in attendance, Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginny; whose hand-in-glove, financially lucrative lobbying relationship with the Heritage Foundation’s Supreme Court casting director Leonard Leo and furtive emails to insurrection plotter John Eastman before the attempted 2021 Trump coup did not inspire her associate justice husband to recuse himself from cases related to the election his wife was so certain was stolen, she joined the movement to overturn it. Clarence is, of course, the most brazenly domiciled Justice, per damning reporting by Pro Publica on the decades of largesse he has received from the likes of billionaire benefactor and Hitler memoribilia aficionado Harlan Crow, who of course has had business before the court. There was also that CNN-uncovered real estate deal and Clarence’s serial failure to disclose the gifts, allegedly because despite being smart enough to be one of just nine jurists on the Supreme Court, he wasn’t savvy enough to know how to fill out the ethics forms. But please, right wingers, say more about affirmative action and DEI…
Moving among the well heeled East Room crowd were Samuel Alito and his wife Martha Ann, possibly the most miserable, angry duo in American public life and the kind of neighbors any normal person would dread. Sam’s life’s work appears to be to hound American women into giving birth to more poor people that his wealthy friends can exploit (or who wealthy white women can adopt) while his wife helps out the cause, by flying angry, partisan, Christian nationalist flags in front of their unwelcoming home (Per Alito: her flags, her choice.) Sam also loves him some free gifts from wealthy donor friends, and he doesn’t care how you feel about it. Or in his words, he is bringing America to a necessary morality.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett was there with her husband Jesse, who according to a report in Rolling Stone opened his white shoe law firm in the District of Columbia once his wife was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. Back in 2024, Jesse took on a new client: Fox Corporation; the parent company of President Donald Trump’s favorite news outlet, Fox “News.” His mission: handle a $3 million defamation case involving a local Fox affiliate that ran a story about a Dolton, Illinois man hired by the town to be a building code enforcement inspector. The issue: the man had served 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a minor. The suit hinged on whether he, as the Fox affiliate reported to its viewers, was tasked with inspecting the outsides of buildings, or entering people’s homes. Jesse likely felt right at home at the dinner, where he could Kiki with his client’s employees, Ainsley Earnhart, Bret Baier and his wife, Maria Bartiromo and her husband, Greg Outfield and his fashion stylist wife Elena Moussa, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Waters and his wife, and their boss, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott. No word on whether Sean Hannity’s invitation got lost in the mail.
Stolen Seat Justice Neil Gorsuch was there with his wife Louise, a British immigrant who became a citizen in 2002 and who hopefully no one in the regime knows claims to love the diversity of cultures in the States. Well at least we know of no open hints of corruption on her part. We leave that to her smug, seat-stealing, polluter-loving husband. By this court’s standards, the Gorsuch scandal bag is relatively light — though he did reportedly sell a 40 acre tract of land he part-owned in Colorado to the head of a firm with substantial business before the court, shortly after donning his black robe via Mitch McConnell’s outright theft in 2017.
Brett Kavanaugh was there with his wife, Ashley (hopefully she encouraged him to keep his hands to himself and go easy on the beer.) And while we’ll likely never solve the mysteries about his magically disappearing debt, or get a real FBI investigation of the credible allegations of sexual assault, which even outdid the sordid tales of “Coke can” Clarence, the junior sex pest justice’s historical legacy will likely be the introduction of the phrase “Kavanaugh stops” to describe the irony of this court majority ratifying the use of race to profile nonwhite immigrants, but not to achieve justice and representation for nonwhite voters.
The invited justices shared the East Room with other members of the Epstein Class: Jeff Bezos, a couple of fashion designers, Howard Lutnick and his wife (oh the stories they could tell about Lolita Island, I’m sure!) as well as hedge fund managers, David Ellison (who is busy buying up the whole media for Trump’s pleasure), Tim Cook, soon to be the very well paid out ex-CEO of Apple, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and John Paulson and their wives, (though not Elon Musk, Sam Altman or Peter Thiel, intriguingly) the heads of Archer Daniels Midland, Boeing, BP, Alphabet and Google, Meta, Barclays, Cargill, and the VP of Goldman Sachs; the former head of Marvel Entertainment, fashion designer Hervé Pierre, who one can assume was there so Melania would have someone to talk to, the editor in chief of The New York Post, Speaker and Trump Toadie Mike Johnson and Senate windmill John Thune, plus a small claque of Senators (Lindsey Graham of course; no word on the bubble wand,) cabinet members and the Vances, who presumably Trump had to invite. The absence of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel raises some questions as well. Perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed classy to remind Charles of his country’s old ties to South Africa, or flaunt the real bosses in front of the King. Or it could be that Trump — ever conscious of aesthetics — worried that the tech oddballs might act weird in front of company. That could explain Palantir boss Alex Karp’s non-invite, too.
Still, I’m sure a good time was had by all. After all, no on in the room had to worry about those astronomical gas and food prices. Those things are your problem, suckers.
Most importantly, the SCOTUS members on hand were invited, and are in the inner circle, because they understand the assignment; which is to do whatever it takes to ensure Republican control of every facet of government, state and federal — through partisan gerrymandering, abetting racial discrimination and gutting the Voting Rights Act, so that the party that makes all of the grifts possible, including their own, remains in charge of the hearings and gavels. It’s like the “we all hang together so we don’t hang separately” quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin in 1776 but which could also apply to Republican politics and the mafia.
Welcome to the new Gilded Age
John Roberts life’s work of repealing the 20th century is essentially complete. What is clear about him is that he is determined to use the Supreme Court to systematically dismantle every outrage against white supremacy and oligarchy that were passed by 20th century congresses and upheld by 20th century Supreme Court majorities: civil rights, voting rights, affirmative action, the admission of nonwhite immigrants, workers rights, environmental care, the secularization of American society, women’s liberation through the right to access contraception and abortion, and LGBTQ rights.
In assigning him the most caustic rulings to write, including both the Dobbs decision that tore up Roe vs. Wade and now in Callais, Roberts has strategically levereged the churlishness and open hatred of modernity of his most useful second, Sam Alito, to effect what his good manners eschew: enshrining a new normal that looks a lot like the old normal under Jim Crow; wherein men of means who look and think like himself, Alito and the other white conservative justices, and who have long been so well served by men who look, think and act like the self-loathing Justice Thomas, could have their way in society, without having to apologize for their privilege.
Almost immediately after the Roberts Court majority issued their ruling — perhaps before dessert was served at the White House — Southern governors, in the old “massive resistance” tradition, begin tearing up the VRA mandated maps and ordering new ones to be drawn up, largely eliminating Black representation, in Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Louisiana, whose neoconfederate governor literally halted a primary election in progress to do it. Civil rights groups on behalf of at least one affected candidate are suing.) Outgoing Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who is a more cautious Ole’ Reb, put the issue on pause until after the midterm elections. Perhaps he knows better than to pull a trigger that could elect yet another statewide Democrat due to the sheer rage of Black voters. Still Kemp, like the other Old/New South governors vowed that future maps will reflect the Calais model, which can be summed up as “few to no Black districts in the former Confederacy.”
People often forget that the economically and politically corrupt Gilded Age and the vicious, apartheid Jim Crow era occurred at the same time, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and following the collapse of Reconstruction. The two ill systems fed and needed each other to survive. And as the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, the seeds of Jim Crow’s death were also sown — though as with anything involving Black people in America, extinguishing Jim Crow took a lot longer.
Well, now John Roberts is digging up the old dry bones of America’s historically racist system and bringing them back from the dead. Only now it might as well be called “Don Crow” — a uniquely corrupt, oligarchic mess combining gargantuan economic inequality, gobstopping ineptitude, a wanton ignoring of the constitution, and open faced, gut bucket racism, anti-Blackness and misogyny, all cloaked in the white, pointy sheet of “colorblindness.” What could possibly go wrong?
Recommended reading:
For a Time, the U.S. Protected Democracy — A requiem for the Voting Rights Act, By Vann R. Newkirk II
Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now — Just say it’s because they’re Democrats, By Adam Serwer
We Lost. Michael Harriot at Contraband Camp
We Are the Architects Now, By LaTosha Brown at Contraband Camp
John Roberts has been a racist political hack since his time in the Reagan Administration. The institution of the US Supreme Court must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.
Conservatives are hell-bent upon undermining the USA's "Second Reconstruction," which replaced the traditional order with cultural changes and increasing social equality. But, like the "Dred Scott" decision, this ruling will motivate everyone who sees injustice in the traditional order to work harder to obtain social equality and cultural change. A "Third Reconstruction" awaits.