How John Roberts will approach his role in Trump's impeachment trial - PBS NewsHour

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Marcia Coyle chief Washington correspondent for "The National Law Journal" and author of "The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution.":

Initially, they would put the impeachment trial in the Supreme Court. There were a couple of plans that would do that. But Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers Number 65 made a very strong argument against keeping impeachment in the Supreme Court, for a number of reasons.

First of all, he said impeachment is inherently a political process, and the Senate was competent enough and independent enough to take on this kind of a task, and, because they were elected representatives, they were more likely to reconcile the public to any decision that was made. He also said that the impeachment process was going to require more flexibility and discretion than a court of law and judges could give, and should be decided by a much larger body than a small number of judges.

And, finally, and maybe more — most importantly, if a president were convicted in the impeachment trial and later faced criminal charges, was convicted, it would be just terribly unfair to make that former president face the same judges who convicted him in an impeachment trial.

Joan Biskupic CNN's legal analyst and author of "The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts.":

The senators themselves sit as a court, juror/judges themselves. And the chief has a distinctly different role than what he has across the street, when he presides at the Supreme Court. He's a presiding officer now. He will not have a vote, as has across the street at the court. He will essentially make the trains run. He will follow the lead of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but he's there in much more of a ministerial role than a substantive one.

The Constitution does say that he should preside. And then the Senate has a set of rules, most recently revised in 1986, which says that he could make determinations on questions of witnesses and evidence, but a majority of the Senate would overrule him, if it so desired.

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Joan Biskupic:

They (Trump and Roberts) have a public relationship in terms of criticism that dates actually to 2012, after John Roberts cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act. Then businessman Donald Trump took to Twitter and said, take a look at him. He's just trying to favor the Georgetown set or something like that.

And he's attacked the court and Chief Justice Roberts on Twitter before. And then, most recently, though, what most people will remember is that, back in November of 2018, President Trump derided a judge who had ruled against him in a case as an Obama judge.

And John Roberts did something unusual. He issued a public statement that said, there are no Obama judges, there are no Trump judges. What we have are a group of men and women wearing robes committed to impartial justice.

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