SCOTUS NEWS
By Amy Howe
on 31 December 2024
at 18:16
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts published his annual report on Tuesday. (Compilation of the Supreme Court of the United States)
At the end of an eventful year at the Supreme Court that included a ruling granting former President Donald Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for his conduct while in office, reports said controversial flags had flown at the home of Justice Samuel Alito, and an ethics investigation by Senate Democrats that found several gift trips that Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose, Chief Justice John Roberts’ annual report, released Tuesday night, focused on what he sees as the threats to the independence of the courts.
One of those threats, Roberts wrote, is disinformation from abroad engendered by foreign countries. Although Roberts did not name any of the “hostile foreign state actors” responsible for such disinformation, the justices will hear oral arguments next week in a challenge to a federal law that would require social media giant TikTok to shut down in the US unless its parent company can sell it before January 19. A federal appeals court upheld the law earlier this month, calling it part of “a broader effort to address a well-substantiated threat to national security posed by the People’s Republic of China.” Roberts’ discussion of disinformation in his report seemed to suggest he may be sympathetic to the TikTok ban.
The chief justice traditionally releases his year-end report on the federal judiciary each year on New Year’s Eve. Robert’s 2023 report discussed the legal profession and the role of artificial intelligence. His 2022 report, in the wake of the court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, emphasized the importance of legal certainty.
This year’s report comes in the wake of growing criticism of the court and the judges’ ruling in June that overturned the long-standing Chevron doctrine, which generally required courts to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of the statutes it administers. Citing his predecessor, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts characterized America’s independent federal judiciary as “one of the ‘crown jewels of our system of government'” — and essential to the rule of law.
But “four areas of illegitimate activity” pose a danger to that independence, Roberts wrote Tuesday. There “has been a significant increase in” threats against judges, he noted, requiring the commitment of “significant additional resources” to protect judges and investigate and prosecute threats against them.
A bill passed earlier this month to avert a government shutdown included more than $25 million in funding for security at judges’ homes. A California man, Nicholas Roske, is scheduled to stand trial in Maryland next year on charges that he tried to assassinate Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2022.
Efforts to intimidate judges — whether by “activist groups” or public officials — can undermine independence, Roberts continued. Roberts warned that critics of the judiciary “should be aware that care in their statements when it comes to judges can provoke dangerous reactions from others.”
Roberts also cited disinformation as a threat to judicial independence, noting that “distorting the factual or legal basis for a decision can undermine confidence in the judicial system.” The judicial branch, Roberts added, “is particularly ill-suited to combat this problem because judges typically only speak through their rulings.” (The Supreme Court does not make its opinions public, with the justices usually reading summaries of their written opinions, available for months after the opinions are released.)
Roberts pointed to the influence of “hostile foreign state actors” as another part of the potential threat. Such actors, he said, could “feed false information into the marketplace of ideas” or “steal information.” In defending the TikTok ban, the Biden administration told the court on December 27 that TikTok “collects massive amounts of data on tens of millions of Americans that ‘China’ could use for espionage or blackmail” and that China “could secretly manipulate platform to advance its geopolitical interests and harm the United States – for example, by sowing discord and disinformation during a crisis.”
Finally, Roberts concluded, “judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.” Roberts went back to the 1950s and 1960s, when federal judges and the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations sided with state governors trying to defy court orders to desegregate schools. Since then, he said, the United States has “avoided standoffs,” but recently “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous proposals, however sporadic, must be rejected,” he wrote he.
The Supreme Court will be back in the spotlight at the beginning of the new year when it hears arguments on January 10 in the TikTok case.
This article was originally published on Howe on the Court.
