On New Year’s Eve, Chief Justice John Roberts published the 2025 year-end report on the federal judiciary. For nearly 50 years, these annual reports consisted of the chief justice’s reflections on the state of the judiciary, some data on the federal court system’s workload, and a handful of recommendations for improvement.
Since 2009, however, Roberts has made the tradition his own, usually foregoing meaningful discussion of current events in favor of recounting insipid historical anecdotes. If you are looking for stories about the future justices who rejected monarchy by signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, you will find them in Roberts’ latest report. If you are looking for information about the sitting justices who are signing opinions that bestow kingly powers unto Donald Trump, you will not.
Since Roberts’s report is so light on details, a brief refresher on the Court’s activity in 2025 is perhaps warranted here. In June, the Court permitted states to deny lifesaving medical care to transgender young people, despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” A few days later, the Court allowed the Trump administration to summarily ship noncitizens to random countries where their lives could be in danger, despite the Fifth Amendment’s promise of “due process of law.” A few months after that, the Court let federal agents carry out mass immigration raids and stop people because of their presumed race and ethnicity, despite the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
These cases are, unfortunately, part of a larger pattern. In 2025, the Supreme Court repeatedly helped the Trump administration and its allies violate the Constitution in furtherance of shared policy goals characterized by violence and bigotry. The conservative legal movement spent decades shaping the federal judiciary into a tool for executing its agenda, and spent 2025 racking up wins before a complicit conservative supermajority.
Yet according to Roberts, there is nothing for the public to worry about. His 2025 report spends seven pages discussing Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the aspirational language of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution’s rough translation of those abstract principles into actual legal obligations. Roberts wraps by quoting President Calvin Coolidge, who in 1926 argued that despite “the clash of conflicting interests” and “partisan politics,” Americans could nonetheless “turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”
Some may balk at Coolidge’s imputation of this view to “every American” in the middle of Jim Crow. But not Roberts. “True then; true now,” he writes.
Roberts’s continued assurances are belied by the actual conduct of his Court. Last year, for instance, the justices granted at least 20 requests from the Trump administration to lift lower court rulings that had blocked the administration from doing illegal things. Yet Roberts paints a rosy portrait of the legal system, praising the judiciary’s “ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches.” He also urges federal judges to “continue” performing their duties “faithfully and impartially,” as if he has been doing so all along.
The public does not share Roberts’ confidence. For the past five years, the Court’s approval rating has hovered between 39 and 42 percent, according to polling conducted by Gallup. In June 2024, the Associated Press found that 70 percent of Americans think the Court is more influenced by ideology than impartiality. In July 2025, YouGov data showed 67 percent of Americans think the Court is “too mixed up in politics,” and 68 percent supported enforcing an ethical code for justices. An October 2025 report by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that 75 percent of Americans think there should be term limits for Supreme Court justices.
The chief justice, though, likes things exactly as they are. In his report, Roberts not only commends judges for upholding the rule of law, but also celebrates the Constitution for giving judges the “life tenure and salary protection” that ostensibly allow them to do so. “This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well,” he writes. In other words, things are going great, and they’ll continue to be great so long as John Roberts can keep his job and his power forever, and no one asks any questions.
