Hightower Lowdown

At his 2005 hearing to be confirmed as chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts had to convince some skeptical senators that he would not be merely a judicial shill for the corporate powers he had long served in both private practice and government work. To get over this hump, the dapper and affable Roberts charmed senators (as well as the media) with a comforting, homespun baseball analogy:"Judges are like umpires," he softly assured the committee. "Umpires don't make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and judge is critical. They make sure everyone plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire."

Boffo performance! This son of a corporate executive, this disciple of (and former clerk for) right-wing Justice William Rehnquist, this faithful Republican who served on George W's legal team that wrested Florida and the presidency away from Al Gore in 2000, this Washington lawyer who made more than $1 million a year representing corporations--Roberts won confirmation by convincing 22 uneasy Democratic senators that he would be an unbiased umpire, not a judicial activist for his former clients. His tenure on the court, he said plainly, would be marked by "modesty and humility."

He lied. In his four years as chief, Roberts has consistently, unabashedly, and rather ruthlessly championed the corporate position over aggrieved workers, the environment, taxpayers, and others. Along the way, he has not been hesitant to make law from the bench. For example, he sided with Goodyear Tire in the infamous 2007 ruling against Lilly Ledbetter. From 1979 to 1998, she was the only woman serving as a plant supervisor at a Goodyear factory in Alabama. Only at the end of her career did Ms. Ledbetter learn that she had routinely been paid as much as 40% less than her male counterparts. So, in 1998, she filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit, which finally made its way to the Supremes. There, in an absurd rewriting of the law and a blatant rejection of legal precedent, Roberts joined four other justices to rule that she had no valid claim because she had not filed suit within 180 days of first suffering the discrimination--even though she didn't know about the pay disparity for 20 years!

In a time when the public has been making clear its disdain for corporate avarice, arrogance, and abuse--and its desire to rein in the ferocious power of these behemoths--Roberts has crafted a slim majority of the nine justices (usually this is himself, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito) to go 180 degrees in the other direction. These five men have quietly turned our judicial branch of government into an activist, antidemocratic force for expanding the reach of corporate elites over the rest of us. [Interesting non sequitur about Scalia and Alito: Irreverent songwriter Randy Newman asked an intriguing question: How is it that the only two tight-assed Italians in America both ended up on the Supreme Court?] [ read more ]