Without Precedent
How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
“A devastating, passionate takedown of Chief Justice John Roberts's Supreme Court by a Washington insider.” —Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.
Without Precedent explodes the falsehood that Roberts is a fair-minded institutionalist who works to blunt the worst impulses of other Republican appointees to the court when, in fact, he has led the rightward transformation of the court’s jurisprudence while presiding over the most corrupt and corrupted Supreme Court in American history.
Informed by Lisa Graves’s experience working on judicial issues for all three branches of the federal government, and based on years of intensive research, Without Precedent not only exposes Roberts as the reactionary politician in robes he has always been but delivers a vigorous plan of judicial reform designed to overcome the divisive, discriminatory, destructive, and anti-democratic machinations of the Roberts court.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Graves, a former chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the founder of investigative watchdog group True Compass, argues in this unsettling debut account that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has been a "destructive force... to American jurisprudence" and "has helped fracture our political system." Her concerns about Roberts go back decades; while working for the Senate committee, she tried, unsuccessfully, to block his 2003 appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals, in the belief that Roberts was a right-wing ideologue who would use the judiciary to advance his agenda. Graves demonstrates how the subsequent decades have validated her fears, drawing on her years spent closely observing the Beltway's excesses to chart how Roberts, once appointed to the Supreme Court, used his influence to check boxes off the to-do list of a cadre of far-right jurists and donors. The scope of the changes wrought are mind-boggling when viewed in toto, and culminate with the 2024 decision sanctifying presidential immunity for official acts, which Graves fears has "mortally damaged our democracy." Her eye for character detail brings to life the odd habits and double standards of her subjects, and her encyclopedic knowledge of conservative history leads to fascinating insights about behind-the-scenes connections between major players. It's a captivating cri de coeur from an up-close spectator to U.S. democracy's downward spiral.
