Trump’s political fate could rest in the hands of the presiding judge – so what sort of role will the chief justice play?

Running for president four years ago, Donald Trump called John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, “an absolute disaster” and “a nightmare for conservatives”.

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Now Trump faces an impeachment trial in the US Senate in which his political fate could rest in the hands of the presiding judge: Roberts.

The chief justice’s role in impeachment is broadly described in the constitution. But there are few guidelines and little precedent indicating what duties, precisely, the chief justice can or might discharge.

So when the Senate trial convenes later this month – if it indeed convenes, with no agreement yet on terms – Roberts will enter the chamber surrounded by questions that go to his philosophy, his character and his background.

Will Roberts take an active role, or stick to the sidelines? Will he help Democrats in their desire to hear from new witnesses in the case, or will he open the way for Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to achieve a quick dismissal? Does Roberts remember that Trump called him a “disaster” – and would it occur to him to care?

“I think a lot of this is going to depend on the role that the chief justice decides to play,” said Hilary Hurd, a JD candidate at Harvard Law who has written about past impeachment trials. “We don’t know whether there’s going to be a tie on any particular motion. There could be, and we know from precedent that the chief justice is empowered to break a tie.”

A survey of Roberts’ time leading the supreme court, his recent public statements and his biography would seem to discourage any expectation Roberts will be an activist presence in the impeachment trial, while leaving open the possibility for a significant and unexpected break with the Republican strategy.

His judicial record reveals Roberts to be a reliable conservative with an independent streak. Trump trashed Roberts as a “nightmare” for the chief justice’s siding with the court’s liberal wing in 2012 to uphold Barack Obama’s healthcare law. Roberts furthere angered conservatives with a ruling last summer that stymied a Trump administration attempt to include a question about citizenship on the US Census.

But Roberts, 64, a George W Bush appointee, is a lifelong Republican with fingerprints on a string of important and divisive rulings, from a 2019 ruling that ducked partisan gerrymandering to a 2013 decision that struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act to a 2010 ruling blamed for opening the floodgates of dark money into politics to a 2008 ruling that enshrined an individual right to own guns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump shakes Roberts’ hand in February 2017 before his address to a joint session of Congress. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/AP

More relevant to his conduct of the Senate trial than Roberts’ judicial philosophy, however, might be his repeatedly demonstrated desire to protect the supreme court and the judiciary writ large from the treacherous currents of partisan politics.

In his 15-year tenure atop the high court, Roberts has fought against the growing public perception, hastened recklessly by Trump, that the judiciary has succumbed to politics.

Roberts went so far as to directly rebuke Trump in November, when the president, who during his first presidential campaign said a judge’s national heritage destroyed his ability to be impartial, attacked another member of the bench as an “Obama judge.”

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Roberts struck against the president again just last week, by some readings, when he warned about “rumor and false information” circulating on social media in his 2019 year-end report on the federal judiciary. In the report, Roberts called on colleagues to “celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability.”

“But we should also remember that justice is not inevitable,” Roberts wrote. “We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch. As the New Year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

Everyone knows what the New Year’s task before Roberts is. “This language from the Chief Justice is encouraging,” tweeted Larry Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

Roberts’ early life was defined by academic brilliance and professional ambition. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1955, he moved as a grade-schooler with his family to Indiana where his father, John Sr, was charged with helping to open a new Bethlehem Steel mill. His mother, Rosemary, raised Roberts and three sisters.

Roberts, a devout Roman Catholic, earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in three years to be followed by Harvard law school, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1979. In addition to Rehnquist, he clerked for the legendary appeals court judge Henry J Friendly, and then he served in the White House counsel’s office under Ronald Reagan.

Roberts worked as a corporate lawyer before entering the George HW Bush administration as deputy solicitor general, arguing dozens of cases before the supreme court. He was first nominated to the federal bench in 1992, but his nomination languished in a Democratic-led Senate. He was ultimately appointed in 2001 and confirmed as chief justice by a 78-22 Senate vote in September 2005.

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He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, a partner with a background in technology law at the firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. They have two children, Josie and Jack.

If Roberts has not sought the role in history he is about to play, history has found him. It looks like just the kind of political trap that he has tried to avoid, as when he stepped away from the partisan gerrymandering case last summer.

Roberts wrote then that “any judicial decision on what is ‘fair’ in this context would be an ‘unmoored determination’ of the sort characteristic of a political question beyond the competence of the federal courts.”

Justice Elena Kagan blasted him for the non-decision. “Of all times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law,” she wrote in her dissent, “this was not the one.”