Civil Discourse – The Chief Justice’s Report on the State of the Judiciary – Joyce Vance
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
The Chief Justice’s Report on the State of the Judiciary
By Joyce Vance, Jan 02, 2026
As is the custom, on the last day of the year, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a report on the state of the federal judiciary. Formally titled “2025 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary,” it starts with this picture.
I don’t mean to nitpick, or maybe I do. Either way, it’s an odd choice. A fancy, empty room. History, devoid of humanity.
I’m sympathetic to the position the Chief Justice is in. It’s not his job to play politics, and restraint is usually the general order of business. But the past year has not been a normal one. The Chief Justice’s year-end report treats it as though it has been.
The past decade has made it clear that our institutions are only as strong as the people in them. That makes this photo a startling choice for a report about the judiciary, albeit likely unintentional. But it’s a marker for what has become increasingly clear: that the majority on this Court has failed to show up in a moment when their institutional voice is desperately needed. The Court has been either unwilling or incapable of meeting the challenge to democracy that Donald Trump poses.
The Court has important cases to decide over the next few months. The National Guard ruling over the holiday was a bright spot where the Court temporarily told Trump no. But there are a number of highly significant cases on presidential powers, immigration, gerrymandering and voting rights, and more, still to come this term.
The Chief Justice’s report takes the form of an essay about American history, followed by statistics about the Court and its work. You can read the full report here.
Civil cases where the administration is a defendant were up a whopping 9% in 2025, according to the Chief Justice.
Roberts begins with the story of Thomas Paine and the publication of Common Sense (interestingly enough, a book I delved into at some length in my book Giving Up Is Unforgivable). He writes, “Paine advanced several key points. A government’s purpose is to serve the people. The colonists should view themselves as a distinctive people—Americans, not British subjects. The colonies had reached ‘that peculiar time which never happens to a nation but once, viz., the time of forming itself into a government.’ And, in view of the foregoing propositions, as an independent nation, the colonists would ‘have it in our power to begin the world over again.’”
This explains Roberts’ choice of illustration—the empty room is the Assembly Room at Independence Hall, the place where the Founding Fathers met and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
Roberts spends some time, without any comment about what it might mean, on the notion of patriotism and treason: “The brave patriots who crafted and approved the definitive statement of American independence pledged to support each other and their new nation with ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’ They understood that the British would view their words and actions as treason. As Franklin reportedly warned, ‘[W]e must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.’” It’s a quote that, absent any context or explanation, can mean all things to all people. A mark of how carefully this Chief Justice continues to navigate the political moment in a survival-oriented fashion, rather than taking a stand and doing something to keep the Republic.
He goes on to heap praise on the sentence in the Declaration of Independence’s preamble that he says, “articulates the theory of American government in a single passage that has been hailed as ‘the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.’” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Chief Justice writes that this sentence, “enunciated the American creed, a national mission statement, even though it quite obviously captured an ideal rather than a reality, given that the vast majority of the 56 signers of the Declaration (even Franklin) enslaved other humans at some point in their lives.”
Then, the Chief Justice goes down a legal rabbit hole, discussing how many of the Founding Fathers were lawyers, many of whom went on to become judges, including Supreme Court Justices. Some of them turned out to be of questionable character, like James Wilson, who spent much of his life trying to evade his debtors. Roberts dwells on Justice Samuel Chase, whose impeachment I also discuss in my book. The Chief Justice makes the same point that I do: the complaints against Chase involved political disagreement with his judicial decisions. But he was not convicted on the articles of impeachment, because disagreeing with a judge’s decisions isn’t a basis for removal from office. The decision forms the basis of the judiciary’s independence and ability to rule on the cases before them based on the facts and the law, without fear of political interference. Again, Roberts recites the incident without drawing any conclusions, perhaps leaving it to judges across the country to infer that he supports them. But at a time when the country needed a resounding defense of judicial independence in the face of criticism by this administration, it simply didn’t get it from the Chief Justice. The moment requires something more than bland understatement.
The Chief Justice touched on some of the most important issues the judiciary faces today, without ever getting to the point. Reading the report, you wouldn’t know that the judiciary has been, quite frankly, under attack by this president. He writes as though he bears no responsibility for handing over unprecedented power to the president, to say nothing of the delay and ultimate grant of immunity from criminal prosecution that facilitated Trump’s return to office. Roberts acknowledges none of that. Instead, he lauds judicial independence, without ever saying that it’s only necessary for him to do so because the president and his minions are challenging judges whose decisions they dislike, as though that’s how this is supposed to work. “The Declaration charged that George III ‘has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.’ The Constitution corrected this flaw, granting life tenure and salary protection to safeguard the independence of federal judges and ensure their ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches. This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well.”
The Chief Justice’s Report on the State of the Judiciary by Joyce Vance
Read on Substack Continue/Read Original Article: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/the-chief-justices-report-on-the
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