by Becca Shaw Glaser July 12, 2022, The Free Press
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, someone posted on social media that he wanted to make a large sign, unavoidable when driving to Port Clyde, that read, “The Real Enemy of the People is the Roberts Court.”
In 2006, shortly after becoming chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, having been nominated by George W. Bush, John Roberts bought a house on Hupper Island, a largely seasonal island just off the tip of Port Clyde. He and his family have been coming here ever since, in summer, and relishing their time here so delightfully that in 2016 they bought an adjoining oceanfront home for $1,495,000. He and his wife, Jane, now own both 10 and 12 Hupper Island. By all accounts, Maine and we Mainers have been very good to John Roberts and his family. But has he been a good friend to Mainers and to Maine?
Though Roberts is sometimes considered in the light of very few distinct moments when he sided with more liberal justices, the reality is that nearly all of his decisions have been extremely conservative. If he is interested in anything more than imposing his right-wing Christian beliefs on the country, it is in trying to promulgate the belief that the Court is legitimate, that it is truly concerned with balance and justice, not with aggressively changing the country. Now that he is flanked with a supermajority of activist justices, who are dead set on forcing their right-wing agenda on the country, and now that Roberts may have returned to the midcoast for what he hopes will be yet another blissful, restorative summer in Maine, it’s time to revisit some of what Roberts has inflicted on the country as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
2010: Roberts joined the 5-4 decision in Citizens United, setting aside precedent to find a First Amendment right for corporations, allowing unlimited “dark money” in elections — one of the most consequential decrees of the past hundred years. Managing things behind the scenes, Roberts shaped the Court’s approach.
2013: Wrote the majority opinion for Shelby County v. Holder, which effectively dismantled the Voting Rights Act.
2013: Voted to oppose marriage equality in United States v. Windsor, in which the 5-4 majority found that major parts of the Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional.
2014: Joined the 5-4 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, allowing private, for-profit corporations to invoke religious objections to stop employees from gaining access to contraception.
2015: Opposed marriage equality in the landmark 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage, doing something he’d never done before: read aloud his dissenting opinion.
2018: Joined the 5-4 majority that undermined workers’ rights to organize in Janus v. AFSCME.
2018: Issued the opinion for the 5-4 majority upholding President Trump’s Muslim travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii, despite the obviousness of the administration’s intent to discriminate on the basis of religion.
2018: Joined the 5-4 majority allowing the Trump administration to ban transgender servicemembers from the military.
2022: Having sent his daughter, Josie, to a Catholic high school, Roberts authored the majority 6-3 opinion in Carson v. Makin, further eroding church and state separation explicitly delineated in the Constitution. The decision requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools for religious education when a student lives in an area without public schools. Maine’s tuition program already did this but required that the schools’ curricula align with secular state standards. The Court’s Christian supermajority decided that didn’t go far enough. In his opinion, Roberts suggested that the concept of secular schooling is just a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion.”
2022: Roberts authored the 6-3 directive in West Virginia et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al. to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, showing how little he really cares about Maine’s clean air, clean water. A victory for coal companies; a travesty for children’s health and our future.
2022: Roberts wrote a concurring opinion with the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, agreeing that Mississippi’s law banning abortion after 15 weeks, even after rape, incest or abuse, was Constitutional. He further said that abortion regulations that considered whether the fetus is “regarded as ‘viable’ outside the womb” should be “discarded.” Yes, Roberts thinks we should be forced to be governmental incubators for a fetus even if it can’t exist without the person it is inside of.
Roberts did not rule with the majority to completely overturn Roe v. Wade. However, this was likely to try to preserve the perceived legitimacy of the Court. As a lawyer in the George H. W. Bush administration, Roberts signed a legal brief urging the court to overturn Roe, and in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, he wrote that they should “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all.” It is not that Roberts supports our right to bodily autonomy and choice, but that his overriding concern was the legitimacy of the Court if Roe were overturned with this particular case, at this particular time. He is thought to prefer a more incremental approach to dismantling our rights.
Lately the Court is acting as a bludgeon to freedom. The New York Times analyzed recent decisions and called it “the most conservative Supreme Court in nearly a century,” yet Roberts wants us to think his governmental body is legitimate?
Are Mainers Simplefolk Who Merely Live and Let Live?
In a 2018 article about John Roberts owning two homes in Maine, Portland-based radio station WJBQ wrote, “If you see the Chief Justice this summer, be sure to say hello! He’s probably enjoying some much needed rest from the political circus in Washington this summer. On second thought … maybe just a nice smile and a wave. He needs all the space he can get to de-stress before he has to go back in the fall!”
A 2007 article in The New York Times about Roberts also paints the idea that us servile Mainers are happy to, “Let the man alone … Let the man enjoy his summer vacation. He works hard.”
Roberts is one of the most powerful people in the entire world. He comes to Maine to unwind and feel good about himself and his decisions, despite if he has just gutted our rights, forcing rape victims to give birth after an arbitrary time period determined by the government, gutted environmental protections, overruled basic gun regulations, decreed against the separation of church and state, and made politics much more unequal and infested with money.
Exactly why should we continue to let Roberts use Maine as his easygoing backdrop for fun and relaxation? Why should Roberts get to breathe in the beautiful Maine air when he is fine with destroying methods of keeping our air clean? If it was our air that changed people’s minds, sure. Send all the conservative judges here. But it’s not. It’s an air that people like him have been coming to for a hundred years to love themselves and their lives and look down on us as simpletons, servants and laborers, as quaint, cute, hardworking, as objects of pity and patronizing admiration, and then go home to do whatever it is that they do in their “real” lives.
John Roberts, We See You
John Roberts, we see you, coming over from Hupper Island in your small boat, last year with two security guards by your side, in your baseball cap and shorts, sipping your Squid Ink coffee because Maine provides such a wonderful retreat that you decided to buy not only one, but two houses on your isolated island of spruce and pines, smelling the sea air, hearing the gulls. It’s too bad you’re totally out of step with most Mainers. We like our freedom so much that we actually want to own our own uteruses and decide, privately, within our relationships and with health care providers, what to do if we get pregnant.
In the last few days I have heard of a rape victim crying for hours over the overturning of Roe. We know what happens when abortion is banned or severely restricted — restrictions you support. More women and trans and non-binary people with uteruses die. More children go into foster care and do not find happy homes. More children grow up poor. More lives are devastated, women are trapped with abusers. This is fundamentally about governmental control, about you being so up in people’s private business that you force rape victims to have the rapist’s baby.
Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy. No. May you never feel welcome here again.
Don’t Like What Roberts Is Doing to the Country?
Should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into Squid Ink coffee or the Port Clyde General Store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultra-conservative court. Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him. Some may wish to try to engage him in conversation. Post signs, write letters addressed to him in the local papers. Protest: take boats to the front of his homes on Hupper Island — he might see you — or organize protests near the general store in Port Clyde.
He deserves to feel unwelcome, or at the very least, slightly uncomfortable, in this independent state of ours where we like to pretend we own our own bodies, where we like to pretend elections can’t be bought and sold with unlimited hidden millions, where we like to pretend that women are no longer property.
Becca’s family originally came to Maine via connections to the Port Clyde sardine factory. They bought land in the 1950s, and Becca lived her early childhood there, with rosa rugosa, rotting seaweed and live music on the beach.