The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court
by Jeffrey Toobin
View on GoodreadsJeffrey Toobin's account of the fraught relationship between the Obama White House and the Roberts Supreme Court — sequel to The Nine — framed around Roberts's flubbed administration of the 2009 oath of office and tracing the Court's conservative turn through Citizens United and the 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
Core ideas
- Toobin's reversal-of-roles thesis: Obama is the incrementalist institutionalist while the Roberts conservatives are the radicals, pursuing a deliberate, well-funded project to unwind decades of post-New Deal precedent on campaign finance, guns, and abortion.
- The book's most consequential reporting is on Citizens United — how a narrow case was deliberately expanded by the conservative majority into a sweeping campaign-finance ruling, treated here as the Roberts Court's defining act of judicial ambition.
- Toobin argues Obama was "fatally slow" to grasp the judiciary's centrality to his agenda — under-prioritizing judicial appointments early, a strategic neglect the book frames as a lasting cost to the progressive project.
Published2012
Pages352
ISBN9780385527200
ReadJun 2026
