Open Letter: John Roberts Redux

Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

This may be my last time to address you, at least as the chief of our highest court. The writing has been on the wall for months, but the moment I understood that your court was a dead man walking took place on the night of Trump’s State of the Union. It was that chilling moment where he thanked you for your favor.

I can only imagine that it was the public payback for giving him a pass on legal accountability. That’s the meaning of Trump vs. the United States, where you told him (and us) that it didn’t matter what he did. Of course we are a nation of laws. They just don’t apply to Donald Trump. The truth is that you have served him slavishly, beautifully, but with Donald Trump, it’s never enough. Think of that moment as the Kiss of Corleone: a gesture of affection before the end comes to Fredo. You will not, God forbid, be assassinated in a little boat. But professional irrelevance is its own finality.

It didn’t have to be this way. You could have led your court to a healthy verdict. Who would have argued with a simple declaration that no American is above the law. It’s who we are and what we’ve been from the moment of our birth as the American People. Instead, you shredded a fundamental truth and let Donald Trump have the final word: “He who saves his country violates no law.” That is, of course, extravagantly wrong, but you turned our courts into a legal doormat. It’s a shame to see Trump’s footprints on your back.

But that, inevitably, in the outcome of your timidity. We are not “approaching” a Constitutional crisis. The crisis is here and you are its black-robed victim. A judge in the system at whose apex you stand has ordered the return of an American resident from a prison which represents spectacular cruelty. Abrego Garcia was officially protected from deportation, but will no doubt die in custody in El Salvador’s CECOT in some accident or mishap which will never be investigated. His blood is already on your hands while your president thumbs his nose at your authority and allows a tinpot dictator to speak in our name. "Of course I'm not going to [return Garcia]. The question,” he told us, is simply “preposterous."

What is preposterous is that you saw none of this coming. Let history record the terrible error of your judgment.

Yours,

Marc Fitzerman, Citizen