Every December 31, Chief Justice John Roberts releases his annual year-end report on the federal courts. It’s a unique opportunity for him to speak not as a member of a nine-person court but as the de facto leader of the American judiciary. In 2017, he praised federal judges and court employees for responding with “extraordinary neighborliness, generosity, and dedication” to a surge in natural disasters. Last year, he discussed the federal courts’ response to abuse and misconduct by judges that became public during the #MeToo reckoning.

In 2019, Roberts’s thoughts dwelled on the American democratic project and its vitality. He opened his report with a discussion of the Federalist Papers, which serve as a Rosetta stone of sorts for American republicanism, and their illustrious authors. “Happily, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution,” he wrote. “Those principles leave no place for mob violence. But in the ensuing years, we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside.”

It’s not surprising that Roberts would express concern about his fellow Americans’ commitment to democratic values in the age of Donald Trump. His concern about civic education is well-founded: A C-SPAN poll last year found that half of Americans can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. (Only 14 percent could name Roberts.) But there’s a strong case to be made that it’s not just regular Americans who “take democracy for granted,” but also John Roberts himself.

The chief justice began his report by recounting how Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote most of the Federalist Papers during the ratification debates. John Jay, the first man to hold Roberts’s office, also made major contributions that were curtailed after he was injured in a New York City riot in 1788. That public revolt began after New Yorkers heard claims that medical students were robbing local graves to hone their surgical skills. “It is sadly ironic that John Jay’s efforts to educate his fellow citizens about the Framers’ plan of government fell victim to a rock thrown by a rioter motivated by a rumor,” Roberts wrote.

Political violence is a serious threat to democratic systems, but other perils to self-government can be more subtle than rock-throwing. Over the past decade, Republican-led states enacted a wave of measures aimed at making it harder for Americans to exercise their right to vote. These measures tend to disproportionately burden nonwhite voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. In states with a history of voter suppression, a mechanism in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 known as “preclearance” once required state and local officials to obtain federal assent before changing their election laws. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, however, the court’s conservative majority struck down the formula drafted by Congress to determine which states fell under preclearance.