Shhh: Chief Justice Drops in on High School Class
High school students in Bethesda had a high-profile visitor yesterday—Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.—in an event that was supposed to have been hush-hush.
The school’s website described his speech this way: “3rd period assembly—discussion of Supreme Court,” the Washington Post reports. In keeping with the low-key spirit, Roberts played down his own power and that of the court, as he took questions from the polite and sometimes drowsy students, the Post story says.
Roberts said he is just one of nine justices on a “passive” court that can do no more than decide some of the cases presented to it.
“I don’t have an agenda,” Roberts said. “If I did, it wouldn’t be something I could implement.”
Nor does Roberts have a lot of power to make his own job cushy. He acknowledged he gets to decide which justice writes the opinion when he is in the majority, but said, “I can’t take all the good ones for myself, and I have to take my share of the dogs.”
Roberts sees part of his mission as encouraging both collegiality and fewer divided opinions. “I try to keep an eye on the interpersonal relationships” of the justices, he said. But his latter mission is running into some roadblocks in the form of contentious issues on the docket. “We haven’t made a lot of progress moving beyond fairly sharp divisions” on the court, he admitted.
