I’ve posted here several times about Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s 'blueprint' for government, and the bizarre interpretation that it offers of Article II of the US Constitution. The Heritage Foundation is an extreme right-wing think-tank and very influential in today's Republican Party. Article II, in Project 2025, is taken to mean ‘all executive power’ is vested in the President. The keyword here is 'all'. This is effectively the argument Trump uses when issuing Executive Orders, and in the courts when challenged, to ‘dismantle the administrative state, ’ an explicit aim of Project 2025. And remember, during his campaign last year, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the 922-page document, claiming no knowledge of it.
In fact, it’s the central plank of his even more chaotic and disastrous second term.
Now, a legal scholar, Peter Shane, an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law, has written in The Atlantic about what he says is: “Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power” and how John Roberts, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) since 2005, has ‘enabled’ and encouraged this distortion of the constitutional position.
The piece is titled: This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built, and sub-titled "The country is witnessing the creation of an all-powerful institution, and one man is responsible." And there is a lot of force in his claim.
A topic of discussion in the US in recent weeks and months has been about the so-called 'separation of powers' between the three branches of government. They are the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive. Together, they are supposed to prevent any particular branch from becoming all-powerful, to moderate and help control the levers of government. This separation is crucial to the proper working of any democratic country.
Shane argues that Trump has now become a “one-person branch of government,” something which should not exist in the US or indeed any government which believes itself to be democratic, and is, according to him, “provably untrue by just reading the Constitution.”
Roberts worked with the George H Bush administration in the late 1980s and was nominated for SCOTUS in 2005 by his son, George W Bush, and immediately became Chief Justice, where he has presided for two decades.
Trump subsequently appointed more Republican judges to the court, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017, Kavanaugh in 2018, and Barrett in 2020. The SCOTUS now sits with a 6-3 majority of conservative-leaning judges, led by Trump's yes-man, Roberts.
Congress has a cowed Republican majority in both the House and Senate, who are mostly terrified of Trump’s MAGA supporters and meekly fall in behind whatever Trump wants. Hence, there is now no real separation of powers, and Trump has essentially become a dictator.
All of this has been created and allowed to happen by John Roberts, according to Shane's article.
A previous hard-line Republican Chief Justice, Antonin Scalia, once said that Roberts "pretty much runs the show," and legal commentators have portrayed Roberts as a consistent advocate for conservative principles.
Step by step, Roberts has dismantled the checks and balances that were previously a bulwark against presidential overreach. As legal challenges arrived at the SCOTUS, the court has made more and more concessions to presidential authority. Just this year:
"In May, the Court held that Trump orders removing two federal officials at key independent agencies could remain in place while the issue of their legality makes its way through the judiciary. In June, it allowed the administration to proceed with so-called third-country deportations—that is, deporting undocumented noncitizens summarily to countries to which they had no prior connection, but where they might well face torture.
"On July 8, the Court effectively allowed Trump to proceed with a massive restructuring of the federal executive branch, notwithstanding that the power over executive-branch organization belongs to Congress, not the president. On July 14, the conservative majority allowed the sabotaging of the Department of Education to proceed.
"Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life."
Roberts was also responsible for writing the ruling in 2024 on presidential immunity, which "has not a word to say about either the Richard Nixon pardon or Bill Clinton’s non-prosecution deal during his last weeks in office—incidents obviously relevant to understanding how earlier presidents assessed the scope of immunity."
Make no mistake, what is happening represents a massive, unprecedented change in the governance of the most powerful nation on earth.
Constitutional change in America is difficult by design - virtually impossible, since the nation and the legislature are finely balanced and have been for decades. The process of formal, legal change is outlined in Article Five of the Constitution. It involves proposing amendments by either a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress or by a national convention called by Congress at the request of two-thirds of the state legislatures.
Once proposed, any constitutional amendments must be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through their legislatures or through locally held ratifying conventions. It is a very, very high bar indeed.
But Roberts has achieved major, far-reaching changes, explicitly against the vision of the founding fathers, by stealth and almost single-handedly, with a little help from a few of his right-wing chums on the SCOTUS. The authors and the shadowy figures behind Project 2025 certainly knew what they were doing.
The lower courts continue to issue rulings against Trump and use temporary restraining orders to block his worst moves while hearings are arranged and cases grind through the legal system. There is a 'litigation tracker' monitoring a growing number of these cases. When I first noticed this tracker, it had 45 cases listed. In March, this had increased to 124 (see HERE) after just 53 days.
It now stands at an astonishing 361. Many (certainly the most important) of these will result in formal rulings against Trump, which he will then appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, where he essentially holds sway through the 70-year-old Roberts.
Shane ends with this:
"When the Court must finally resolve the controversies concerning birthright citizenship, the capricious withholding of government grants, the unauthorized dismantling of government agencies, or the use of extortionate tactics to secure the submissiveness of independent institutions, John Roberts will likely again write opinions for a majority. Ideally, he will be open to rethinking his extreme version of what the presidency represents and what the chief executive may do without meaningful legal accountability.
"But given the path he has taken so far, optimism seems naive."
The bigger problem in all of this is how reluctant Republicans will be to relinquish power in the 2026 midterm elections and in 2028 when the White House is again in play. They will be well aware of the immense, unchecked power that is being slowly transferred to the Oval Office and will fear it being used against them. Who knows what they are capable of?
America is on a slippery slope to an authoritarian nightmare from which it may be impossible to escape, courtesy of one old man. And it isn't Donald Trump.
