Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Garrett Epps

John Roberts has a way of inserting himself into almost every political setting. He upstaged Barack Obama at his first Inauguration; he made his the most important single vote cast in the 2012 election; he has upended 2014 politics with his opinion gutting the Voting Act. Now it turns out he has assumed a key role in the War on Terror.

So it seems entirely reasonable for The New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse to suggest that “we have given the chief justice — any chief justice, not just this one — too much to do.”

The question is being raised now because recent leaks give us a disturbing look the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The chief justice selects the 11 district judges who serve on this court; his discretion is subject only to a few limits: the judges must come from at least seven appeals-court circuit, one must be a district judge of the District of Columbia, and no fewer than three must live within 20 miles of D.C. The FISA panel was originally conceived as simply a mechanism to grant warrants for surveillance — the equivalent of a magistrate who looks at an affidavit from a police officer and then orders a search or seizure. It’s an important function, but pretty pedestrian (or as lawyers like to say, “ministerial”). Since 2007 or so, though, the FISA Cou

Read More  Does the Chief Justice Have Too Much Power? – Garrett Epps – The Atlantic.