Even Republican appointees on the Supreme Court — two of them, anyway: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — are evidently appalled by President Trump and his behavior. Small comfort, perhaps, as they joined three other conservative justices to uphold Trump’s travel ban, but still a striking example of where this president has brought us.
The justices don’t say this directly, of course. But their scorn for the president and their alarm about his behavior emerges clearly from their language.
First, consider the chief justice’s majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, in which he took an unnecessary historical detour. “The President of the United States possesses an extraordinary power to speak to his fellow citizens and on their behalf. Our Presidents have frequently used that power to espouse the principles of religious freedom and tolerance on which this Nation was founded,” Roberts observed.
His examples were both familiar and sobering: George Washington, in 1790, reassuring the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., that “happily the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the opening of the Islamic Center of Washington in 1957, pledging to a Muslim audience that “America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church.” And, of course, George W. Bush, days after the Sept. 11 attacks, returning to “the same Islamic Center to implore his fellow Americans — Muslims and non-Muslims alike — to remember during their time of grief that ‘the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,’ and that America is ‘a great country because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth.’ ”
