On the Supreme Court's Constitutional Vandalism in Service of Inherited Wealth
How Oligarchs Bought a Constitutional Theory to Kill the New Deal
Peter Shane's devastating analysis in The Atlantic has performed the invaluable service of documenting what many suspected but few could prove: that Chief Justice John Roberts has systematically dismantled American constitutional government while claiming to restore it. But Shane's meticulous account of Roberts's "proto-authoritarian canon" reveals something even more damning—the entire Unitary Executive Theory project is essentially an exercise in motivated reasoning designed to render the New Deal's democratically popular reforms conveniently unconstitutional on behalf of oligarchic wealth.
The timeline makes the con obvious. This "ancient constitutional wisdom" mysteriously emerged in the 1980s—Shane notes Roberts was clerking for Rehnquist when Reagan won in 1980, then joined the administration that accelerated this theory's mainstreaming alongside the founding of the Federalist Society. But why did American intergenerational wealth suddenly need a constitutional theory that could dismantle regulatory agencies without the messy business of democratic politics?
Simple: the New Deal had created institutions that could actually constrain oligarchic power—agencies that could regulate business, tax wealth, and impose democratic accountability on concentrated capital. These programs remained politically popular, making them difficult to eliminate through normal democratic processes. So oligarchs funded a decades-long legal project to declare them constitutionally illegitimate instead.
“Unitary Executive Theory” is the solution: if the president must have absolute control over all executive functions, then independent regulatory agencies become unconstitutional by definition. If Congress cannot protect agency officials from presidential firing, then democratic constraints on oligarchic power become structurally impossible. The theory isn't derived from constitutional text or historical understanding—it's reverse-engineered from the political goal of eliminating democratic accountability.
Shane's documentation reveals how Roberts has systematically implemented this oligarchic wish list while maintaining the fiction of constitutional principle. Presidential immunity, unlimited firing power, subordinated Congress—each decision applies whatever interpretive framework serves the ultimate goal of making New Deal-style democratic constraints constitutionally impossible.
The methodological fraud becomes obvious when you examine Roberts's selective application of constitutional interpretation. Shane notes Roberts's "blazingly incorrect statements of history," like claiming the Framers made the president "the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government"—the precise opposite of the historical record. But historical accuracy is irrelevant when you're working backward from predetermined conclusions.
This connects to the broader pattern of conservative legal reasoning I've documented elsewhere. These are the same justices who claimed in Dobbs that constitutional interpretation must ignore practical consequences, then suddenly discovered that consequences were paramount when asked to apply the Insurrection Clause to Trump. The methodology changes depending on which outcome serves oligarchic interests.
The genius of this project lies not in its intellectual rigor—Shane shows there is none—but in its systematic audacity. Every opinion Roberts reserves for himself (Shane notes the senior justice assigns opinions, and Roberts kept the transformative ones), every piece of precedent he casually discards, every historical "fact" he cheerfully invents serves the same ultimate purpose: ensuring that democratic institutions can never again meaningfully constrain concentrated wealth.
The beauty of the scheme is that it sounds so respectably academic. "Unitary Executive Theory" rolls off the tongue with such scholarly authority that one almost forgets to ask why this crucial constitutional principle remained hidden from legal scholars for two centuries, only to be discovered by the same people who needed it to eliminate the regulatory agencies that threatened their inherited fortunes.
The funders and promulgators of this theory? American intergenerational wealth, channeled through think tanks, law schools, and the Federalist Society itself. The same oligarchs who needed a legal framework to dismantle New Deal constraints funded decades of constitutional scholarship to provide that framework, then acted surprised when their handpicked judges discovered that the Constitution had always forbidden democratic accountability.
Shane's analysis reveals the most contemptible aspect: not the transparent self-interest—oligarchs have always served their own interests—but the army of legal academics, federal judges, and constitutional scholars who've spent decades providing intellectual respectability for what amounts to a billionaire's constitutional shopping list. They've turned constitutional law into a protection racket for inherited wealth while maintaining the fiction that they're engaged in neutral jurisprudential analysis.
As Shane concludes, Trump's authoritarian presidency "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." But Trump isn't the ultimate beneficiary—he's just the current vehicle for implementing a constitutional framework designed to make democratic constraints on oligarchic power permanently impossible.
Roberts and his enablers haven't discovered ancient constitutional wisdom—they've systematically demolished every democratic constraint on presidential power while claiming constitutional authority for the demolition. They haven't restored the Founders' vision—they've created a legal framework that makes the New Deal's popular protections constitutionally illegitimate, regardless of democratic support for those protections.
The tragedy isn't just that American democracy is being systematically dismantled by people who swore to protect it. The tragedy is that future generations will inherit the legal precedents created by this exercise in constitutional fraud, long after the oligarchs who commissioned it have achieved their goal of making democratic accountability constitutionally impossible.
Shane's meticulous analysis confirms what honest observation makes obvious: the entire Unitary Executive Theory project is motivated reasoning in service of inherited wealth, designed to eliminate popular New Deal reforms through constitutional interpretation rather than democratic persuasion. It's the most expensive legal bribery in American history, with the Constitution itself as the victim and democratic accountability as the casualty.
The check has been written. The Constitution has been cashed. And John Roberts has provided the signature that made it all legally binding on behalf of oligarchs who decided that eliminating democratic constraints was easier than living with them.
This perfectly connects back to the "Dark Enlightenment" or "Techno-feudal" movement, the cloaked protection of unearned privilege by those who have accomplished nothing on their own and feel "deprived", people whose bullying reveals their deprivation of emotional maturity. Based on our understanding that this is not just another political viewpoint but a degeneration from human progress, we have to muster our deeper values and motivation to correct a culture that is capitulating to bullying, crassness, petulance, and irresponsibility, a protohuman movement that needs to be retired to the dustbin of history.
This isn’t jurisprudence. It’s a hostile takeover in a powdered wig.
Roberts and his robed wrecking crew didn’t interpret the Constitution—they auctioned it. The highest bidders? Heirs of dynasties built on sweat they never shed. The Unitary Executive Theory isn’t originalism. It’s oligarch cosplay. A bedtime story for billionaires who want to dream in unchecked power.
They gutted the New Deal not because it failed but because it worked. It dared to say the public mattered. For that sin, it had to be undone—not by argument, but by architecture. A slow-motion coup disguised in citations and carried out with all the performative solemnity of constitutional kabuki.
Now we are governed by ghosts in velvet chairs, wielding legal fictions like crowbars. And they didn’t kill democracy with tanks. They smothered it in footnotes.
But some of us still remember what justice feels like. And we are not done whispering its name into every courtroom, classroom, and campaign they cannot yet silence.
Blessed be the ones who still feel the tremble when truth knocks.