Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

John Roberts Says It Isn’t Justices’ Job To Carry Water For Presidents Who Appoint Them

Screenshot/YouTube/BakerInstitute

Supreme Court justices are not obligated to keep in step with the politics of presidents who appoint them, Chief Justice John Roberts said during public remarks on Tuesday.

When asked by Southern District of Texas Senior District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal to name the biggest misconceptions about the Supreme Court, Roberts explained that it’s not unusual for justices to surprise those who appointed them.

“The notion that we carry forward the views of the people that appointed us is absurd,” Roberts said at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “President George W. Bush appointed me 20 years ago. The idea that I’m carrying out his agenda somehow is absurd. The issues here, now today, nobody would have thought those were going to be a big deal 20 years ago.”

Roberts did not name President Donald Trump, who has unleashed a firestorm of criticism on the Supreme Court since it found his tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) unlawful.

While Trump said in February he is “proud” of Justice Brett Kavanaugh — one of the three justices appointed in his first term — while calling the decision by his other two appointees “an embarrassment to their families.”

“Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization,” Trump wrote in a long Truth Social post on Sunday. “The sad thing is, they will only get worse! They wouldn’t even call out The Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, because they said that I, as President of the United States, did not have ‘standing’ to challenge it, and now, with time, it has been conclusively proven to be stolen.”

Trump claimed the “completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” adding all he can do as president is “call them out for their bad behavior.”

Roberts noted Tuesday that “history is full of examples of presidents appointing people and being really surprised how they turned out, going both ways.”

“Felix Frankfurter turned out to be a lot more conservative than his appointing judge…Justice Brennan, a lot more liberal than his,” Roberts said.

“Certainly, I’ll always be grateful for President Bush for appointing me, and I’m sure all my colleagues are grateful there,” he continued. “But the idea that I’m carrying out, or they are carrying out some different agendas, I think really fallacious.”

During his remarks, he also said “personally directed hostility” towards judges has “got to stop.”

In 2026 alone, 202 out of around 2,500 active federal judges have been “named as threatened on a protective investigation,” according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Kavanaugh faced an assassination attempt in 2022 after the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

The man responsible was sentenced to just over 8 years in October after coming out as transgender. The Justice Department is appealing the sentence, which Attorney General Pam Bondi called “woefully insufficient.”