The Next Nine Years by Linda Greenhouse
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. begins his 10th Supreme Court term next Monday. That’s a fact all but guaranteed to startle those of us who remember as if it were yesterday the weird and intense Supreme Court summer of 2005, bracketed by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s unexpected retirement announcement and, two months later, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s death at 80 from thyroid cancer. Those events propelled John Roberts, originally President George W. Bush’s choice for the O’Connor vacancy, to the center chair to which the president quickly switched the nomination. At 50, he was the youngest chief justice since John Marshall. Of today’s justices, only Elena Kagan, at 54, is his junior.
It has been an eventful nine terms for the court and its chief. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Justice O’Connor’s eventual replacement, is well to her right and has provided Chief Justice Roberts with a reliable if narrow majority for the court’s steady regression on race and its deregulatory hijacking of the First Amendment. Along with ever-expanding accommodation of religious interests, these are the areas in which the Roberts court has made its increasingly predictable mark.
Anniversaries are a typical time for this kind of stock-taking, but what’s most interesting about this anniversary is not the past, but the future: the next nine years. What kind of Supreme Court will John Roberts find himself presiding over, and how will he respond to what is highly likely to be a change, in one direction or the other, from the knife edge on which his current majority rests?
Nine years from now, Chief Justice Roberts will be 68, which happens to be the average age of the current justices. Nine years from now, there will have been two presidential elections, with a third election year just months away. I hope this puts into perspective the tedious debate over whether Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should take a bullet for the left and hang up her robe. I don’t intend to contribute to that debate except to advise the hyperactive 81-year-old justice, who is giving interviews these days at a rate faster than I can keep up with the transcripts, that she shouldn’t stay a day longer than she chooses to. In case anyone has, quite understandably, come away from all the chatter with an image of Justice Ginsburg as an aging grandmother among a bevy of spry youths, I’ll just point out that both Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy are 78, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer is 76.
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