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“ ‘Look, we have great respect for the institution of the Supreme Court of the United States, but Chief Justice John Roberts has been a disappointment to conservatives — whether it be the Obamacare decision, or whether it be a spate of recent decisions all the way through Calvary Chapel .’ ”
That’s Vice President Mike Pence speaking to Christian Broadcast Network on Wednesday about the Chief Justice John Roberts and the perception that the judge hasn’t maintained conservative standards in recent Supreme Court decisions.
‘ I think several cases out of the Supreme Court are a reminder of just how important this election is for the future of the Supreme Court,” Pence told Brody.
Pence’s comments appear to make selecting future Supreme Court justices a key piece of President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term in the Oval Office.
Roberts, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush in 2005, notably voted with Democratic appointees in the Supreme Court late last month as the court denied a rural Nevada church’s request to strike down a 50-person cap on worship services as part of the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A report in The Guardian in June referred to Roberts as the Supreme Court’s swing vote, noting that faith among conservative leaders in the Chief Justice has “been shaky ever since he prevented the court from gutting Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2015.”
Roberts’s decisions of late even elicited this tweet from freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, who characterized the justice as acting like “a politician:”
Pence’s comments about Roberts comes as Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in national polls ahead of the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 3.
Biden leads Trump by 6.4 percentage points in Real Clear Politics poll average, though some sources note that the incumbent president’s position has stabilized of late.
That comes as the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.10% is within striking distance of new record, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -0.08% has registered 31 record highs so far in 2020 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.01% is trading around its highest level since early June.
The rally in stocks defy the weakness in the U.S. economy that shows that millions of Americans are still out of work and are struggling to make ends meet.
