Monticello Gets It Right
Chief Justice John Roberts built the most anti-Civil Rights Supreme Court in 70 years. So, of course, Monticello is giving him a medal
John Roberts has spent his tenure building the most anti-civil-rights Court in seventy years. So, naturally, Monticello is giving him a medal.
A Washington Post analysis published this week confirms what the docket already suggested: the Roberts Court is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil-rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities. Under Roberts, the Court has favored religious-rights claims 98 percent of the time, while voting to uphold voting access or campaign-finance restrictions a mere 7 percent of the time. A scholar who led the study put the point plainly: “There is no center now.”
That is the Court John Roberts built. And that is why, in the eyes of the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, he is a 2026 medalist.
Jane Kamensky, who leads Monticello, remarked that in this anniversary year we are called to “reflect on our shared responsibility” to carry Jefferson’s “promise forward”—that the medalists demonstrate how “principled leadership” strengthens American institutions.
She is right about every word of it. She has simply chosen, with more honesty than she likely realizes, the correct Jefferson.
Roberts only looks like a contradiction if you are still clinging to the wrong ghost.
