WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that the Constitution remains a sturdy pillar for the country, a message that comes after a tumultuous year in the nation's judicial system with pivotal Supreme Court decisions on the horizon.
Roberts said the nation's founding documents remain ''firm and unshaken,'' a reference to a century-old quote from President Calvin Coolidge. ''True then; true now,'' Roberts wrote in his annual letter to the judiciary.
The letter comes after a year in which legal scholars and Democrats raised fears of a possible constitutional crisis as Republican President Donald Trump's supporters pushed back against rulings that slowed his far-reaching conservative agenda.
Roberts weighed in at one point in March, issuing a rare rebuke after Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who had ruled against him in a case over the deportation of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members.
The chief justice's Wednesday letter was largely focused on the nation's history, including an early 19th-century case establishing the principle that Congress shouldn't remove judges over contentious rulings.
He also called on judges to ''continue to decide the cases before us according to our oath, doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and performing all of our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constitution and laws of the United States.''
While the Trump administration faced pushback in the lower courts, it has scored a series of some two dozen wins on the Supreme Court's emergency docket. The court's conservative majority has allowed Trump to move ahead for now with banning transgender people from the military, clawing back billions of dollars of congressionally approved federal spending, moving aggressively on immigration and firing the Senate-confirmed leaders of independent federal agencies.
The court also handed Trump a few defeats over the last year, including in his push to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities.
