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Political Cases Test Roberts’s Efforts to Keep the Supreme Court Above It All

  • Chief justice splits difference in census, gerrymander cases
  • Roberts has said there are no ‘Obama judges or Trump judges’
Chief Justice John Roberts

Chief Justice John Roberts

Photographer: Jabin Botsford/Pool via Bloomberg
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U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts has often said the Supreme Court isn’t a partisan institution. Confronted with two of the court’s most explicitly political cases in years, he tried to prove it.

The Republican-appointed Roberts underscored his independence from Donald Trump Thursday by joining the court’s four liberals to at least delay the president’s bid to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census.