Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due next year. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

From the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has engaged in a relentless series of lawless and presumptively unconstitutional actions. Firing thousands of federal employees without cause and dismantling whole agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, proceeding without so much as a by-your-leave to Congress, which created them and showed no sign, even under Republican management, that it wanted them destroyed.

He’s abused so-called emergency powers to assert he can personally control world trade through whimsical imposition or removal of tariffs and — in a case now before the Supreme Court — attempted to fire whoever offends him from independent agencies designed especially to guard against such removals.

Millions have taken to the streets to protest the harsh and vindictive way in which Trump has chosen to govern until the next election offers a better opportunity to resist a president whose zeal for personal and institutional power knows no bounds.

But there’s been hardly a peep about an institution, and its leader, that may in the long run represent the greater threat to the constitutional order established in 1789 and the nation whose 250th birthday we hope to celebrate next year.

After all, Trump will serve only three more years and Americans can elect a new president pledged to obey the law and respect election results. Members of the Supreme Court, however, serve for life and the cumulative weight of their decisions may fundamentally change the Constitution’s checks and balances, the understanding that we have three co-equal branches to ensure no one branch, and no one president, acquires ultimate power.

The pattern by now is depressingly familiar. The lower courts, including nominees by all recent presidents, including Trump, block actions that appear to violate the law only to have the Supreme Court, almost without exception, dissolve the injunctions and allow Trump to proceed. Chances of undoing the damage by the time the court gets around to final rulings is just about nil.

And in cases that have come become the court, the six-member supermajority led by Chief Justice John Roberts has made it all too clear where we’re headed. Such was the case with independent agencies, their members appointed by the president, often with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, that are protected against arbitrary removal precisely to guarantee this tenure even if their conclusions offend the president.

Considering the enormous concentrations of wealth and corporate power the 21st century has produced, one would think such independence is more vital than ever. Instead, Roberts made it clear in oral argument that the original 90-year-old precedent that prevented Franklin Roosevelt from firing an agency head, Humphrey’s Executor, is a “dried husk” the court should sweep away. If it’s a “husk,” it’s because the Roberts court made it so.

The National Labor Relations Board, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and a dozen other agencies can’t perform their regulatory roles if a president is free to replace any member. The court hints it views the Federal Reserve Board differently, but there’s no legal distinction to ground it.

Roberts, the most dominant chief justice since Earl Warren served from 1953-69, has long wanted to implement the “unitary executive” theory, which holds that all authority over the federal government’s 2 million employees must be wielded directly by the president. It’s long been a crackpot legal theory — and still should be — but it’s alarmingly close to reality if the Roberts Court tears up the civil service protections that the expertise and competence of federal agencies depends on.

If the president has total control over hiring and firing, we will have demolished the civil service begun in the 1880s after President Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office-seeker. We’ll instead return to the “spoils system,” where competence and ability mean nothing and loyalty to the president everything.

Roberts is also nearing completion of his mission to effectively repeal the Voting Rights Act as it applies to elections, just as he’s elevated the rights of billionaires to fund political campaigns far beyond any contributions ordinary citizens can make. 

Chief Justice Warren made the rights of individuals central to his jurisprudence, and was clearly ahead of public opinion when Brown v. Board of Education struck down racially segregated schools in 1954, producing “massive resistance” — though today almost no one wants to bring back segregated schools. As I was growing up, you could still see “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards, and not just in the South.

If we’re truly aware of the threats to our constitutional rights posed by a court that’s supposed to guard them, some strategically placed “Impeach John Roberts” signs would eloquently make that point.