WASHINGTON — The combination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and President Obama creates a version of a physics problem: How can such smooth personalities create so much friction?
That conundrum was on display four years ago, when these two supremely capable men managed to botch the simple task of reciting the presidential oath at Mr. Obama’s first inauguration.
The moment was not an anomaly. It is hard to think of a major public encounter between the two that has not gone badly awry or been tinged with hard feelings.
In other settings, they are cool, cerebral and polished, and neither is given to gaffes or insults. Together, they seem to rub each other the wrong way.
They will have another chance on Monday to display the consummate competence that has marked their individual ascents to the summits of their respective branches of government when they will take another stab at a call-and-response recitation of the presidential oath set out in the Constitution.
The roots of the tense relationship can be traced to 2005, when Mr. Obama, then a senator, did what he could to deny Chief Justice Roberts the job he now holds. In explaining why he cast one of just 22 votes against the nomination, Mr. Obama started by praising his fellow Harvard Law graduate’s temperament and legal skill. He might as well have been talking about himself.
But Mr. Obama followed the praise with a caustic assessment of the nominee’s work as a lawyer in Republican administrations.
“He has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” Mr. Obama said, accusing the nominee of not having done enough to fight race discrimination and what he called the unfair treatment of women in the workplace.
The differences in the two men’s worldviews have been on display ever since. The first piece of legislation Mr. Obama signed into law, for instance, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. It reversed a 5-to-4 decision, with the chief justice in the majority, that had limited the ability of women to sue for pay discrimination.
But it was the Citizens United decision in 2010, which allowed unlimited election spending by corporations, that provoked the most memorable public clashes. Just days after the decision, Mr. Obama used his State of the Union address to criticize Chief Justice Roberts and five of his colleagues to their faces, saying their decision would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”
The chief justice sat seething. A couple of months later, in remarks at a law school, he said the event had been “a political pep rally.”
“I’m not sure why we are there,” he said. “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think, is very troubling.”
After the arguments last March over the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul law, the president took the unusual step of launching what sounded like a pre-emptive attack, or at least a brushback pitch, aimed at the chief justice.
“I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” he said.
In June, Chief Justice Roberts broke with his usual allies to vote to uphold the law, handing Mr. Obama an election-season gift. But he went out of his way to suggest that the law, even if it barely cleared the constitutional bar, did not seem like a good idea.
“It is not our job,” he wrote, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Monday’s inaugural ceremony would be stressful enough without this tense personal history. After all, when the two men stepped on each other’s lines four years ago, they managed to provoke the first crisis of the Obama administration. When administration lawyers expressed worry that Mr. Obama had not actually assumed the presidency, a do-over was quietly arranged the next day in the Map Room of the White House.
The authoritative account of the entire debacle is in Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.” The resourceful Mr. Toobin tracked down an audio recording of the Map Room oath that a newspaper pool reporter had had the presence of mind to keep. As the second try was about to start, Mr. Obama urged the chief justice to take it slowly this time.
Mr. Toobin relied on ellipses to capture the tone of the president’s comment: “His remark to the chief justice had an ... edge.” Mr. Obama’s second inauguration will again feature two opportunities to tackle the oath. The chief justice is scheduled to administer the one that counts in a small ceremony in the Blue Room of the White House on Sunday, in time for the noon deadline set by the Constitution.
Then the president and the chief justice will find themselves face to face before the nation on Monday, required only to recite a familiar set of words in the right order. Piece of cake.
Should there be trouble, though, Mr. Obama’s allies will not be quick to blame the chief justice who rescued the health care law. “Given health care,” said Robert Gibbs, who served as Mr. Obama’s press secretary, “I don’t care if he speaks in tongues.”