Chief Justice John Roberts Warns Against Defiance of Court Rulings

After eroding trust in the Supreme Court and rule of law, Chief Justice Roberts is now sounding the alarm about potential defiance of the embattled institution.

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2025 was ushered in on a wave of Trump supporters’ discontent and attempts to control the MAGA monster, and the man is not even in office yet. It is a less than auspicious beginning, and yet wholly predictable.

And now it’s Chief Justice Roberts’ turn at the wheel. His court gave immunity to a convicted felon who was running for office after inciting an attack against the United States of America, but now he’s concerned about potential defiance of court rulings.

Naturally, his concern seems aimed at The People more than the convicted felon/leader of the Republican Party who is most likely to defy the court, and whose allies, including his own Vice President J.D. Vance (where is he, by the way?) have already suggested they would just ignore rulings they don’t like.

Roberts warns against what he helped create

The George W. Bush appointee claimed he welcomes criticism, but “‘illegitimate activity,’ including violence, intimidation tactics, disinformation and open threats of defiance, risks undermining the democratic system.”

"Within the past few years, elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected," Roberts wrote, as reported by ABC News.

Roberts carefully avoided calling out the most frequent and most powerful purveyor of defying the rule of law. Indeed, rather than focus on the incoming convicted criminal, Roberts seemed particularly concerned with uprisings like the 1960s:

"Every Administration suffers defeats in the court system -- sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics. Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the Nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s."

Roberts is focused on what a lot of elites are right now: The rising awareness among the Left and Right that there is an ongoing class war aimed at them, disguised as a culture war for the purposes of dividing them. This class war will no doubt be escalated by the adjudicated con artist’s incoming entourage of wildly unrestrained billionaire oligarchs.

So Roberts noted the "serious threats" against federal judges and "doxxing" of federal judges.

"Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others," Roberts wrote.

Huh. This seems like something Roberts should have thought of before his court put a fake gold crown on the head of an adjudicated rapist whose every interaction with the legal system has shown marked displays of “intemperance.”

Violence against public officials is certainly not okay.

But this court has given immunity to a man who is notorious for a movement that incites threats against judges, jurors, and witnesses and a man accused of inciting the deadly terrorist attack on January 6th during which approximately 140 police officers were assaulted.

How can this court expect to be taken seriously when they handed the keys to the country to someone with a record of defying the legal system and inflicting harm on public officials?

JD Vance said Trump should defy the Supreme Court

In February of 2024, J.D. Vance was asked by ABC’s This Week host George Stephanopoulos about his 2021 comments that in 2024, Trump should “‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people’ and that if he was blocked from doing so, that he should ‘stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it’.”