Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that the Constitution remains a sturdy pillar for the country, a message that comes after a tumultuous year in the nation’s judicial system, with pivotal Supreme Court decisions on the horizon.
Roberts said the nation’s founding documents remain “firm and unshaken,” a reference to a century-old quote from then-President Calvin Coolidge. “True then; true now,” Roberts wrote in his annual year-end letter to the judiciary.
The letter comes after a year in which legal scholars and Democrats raised fears of a possible constitutional crisis as President Trump and GOP supporters pushed back against rulings that slowed his far-reaching conservative agenda.
Roberts weighed in at one point earlier this year, issuing a rare rebuke after Mr. Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who had ruled against him in a case over the deportation of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a March statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Roberts has spoken about the importance of judicial independence before. In his year-end report to close out 2024, he highlighted four areas that he said threatened the independence of judges: violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.
The chief justice’s Wednesday letter was largely focused on the nation’s history, including an early 19th-century case establishing the principle that Congress shouldn’t remove judges over contentious rulings.
While the Trump administration faced pushback in the lower courts, it has scored a series of some two dozen wins on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. The court’s conservative majority has allowed the administration to move ahead for now with barring transgender people from the military, clawing back billions of dollars of congressionally approved federal spending, moving aggressively on immigration and firing the Senate-confirmed leaders of independent federal agencies.
The court also handed Mr. Trump a few defeats over the last year, including in his push to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities.
Other pivotal issues are ahead for the high court in 2026, including arguments over Mr. Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship and a ruling on whether he can unilaterally impose tariffs on hundreds of countries.
Roberts’ letter contained few references to those issues.
It opened with a history of the seminal 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” written by Thomas Paine — a “recent immigrant to Britain’s North American colonies,” Roberts noted — and closed with Coolidge’s encouragement to “turn for solace” to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence “amid all the welter of partisan politics.”
