{"id":150620,"date":"2026-05-07T12:33:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/07\/john-roberts-dismayed-public-sees-supreme-court-as-political-actors-just-because-theyre-political-actors\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:33:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:33:32","slug":"john-roberts-dismayed-public-sees-supreme-court-as-political-actors-just-because-theyre-political-actors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/07\/john-roberts-dismayed-public-sees-supreme-court-as-political-actors-just-because-theyre-political-actors\/","title":{"rendered":"John Roberts Dismayed Public Sees Supreme Court As \u2018Political Actors\u2019 Just Because They\u2019re Political Actors"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there\u2019s one thing that Chief Justice John Roberts loves more than stripping Black people of meaningful voting rights, it\u2019s playing the disappointed dad act with the public. Over the last several years, Roberts has fed the media manicured sound bites as a reluctant scold, chastising the public for not understanding the Supreme Court\u2019s very important work<\/em> and getting pre-occupied with unimportant trifles like \u201cjustices taking hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s just so TRAGIC that people care more about the Supreme Court erasing decades worth of civil rights as opposed to the real<\/em> threat: hurting the Court\u2019s public approval rating.<\/p>\n

At the Third Circuit judicial conference, Roberts was at it again.<\/p>\n

Roberts defended the Supreme Court from what he characterized as the public\u2019s unfortunate misconceptions<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI think at a very basic level, people think we\u2019re making policy decisions, [that] we\u2019re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides. I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don\u2019t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes, how could anyone mistake the Supreme Court\u2019s conservative majority for \u201cpolitical actors\u201d mere days after throwing aside decades of well-settled law to rewrite the nation\u2019s election laws<\/a>. A move that the Supreme Court took only<\/em> after Democrats in California and Virginia responded to Republican gerrymandering efforts, creating a new political crisis for the Republican Party<\/a> that didn\u2019t exist over the prior 61 years. After all that time, the majority decided it was so obviously unconstitutional that they had to rush out a decision in the middle of an active election and waive its longstanding rules to make sure other states get their new maps in under the wire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One has to wonder if Roberts prepared this speech expecting that decision to come later.<\/p>\n

If the public views a Supreme Court staffed by justices who previously worked on stifling the 2000 Florida recount<\/a>, drafted DOJ memos plotting to disenfranchise Black voters<\/a>, or married Big Lie activists<\/a>, as \u201cpolitical\u201d that\u2019s quite accurate<\/em> really. It\u2019s not that the justices can\u2019t have political preferences \u2014 that\u2019s the nature of the process at this point. But it\u2019s one thing to be an advocate and another to be a judge. The fact that this Court consistently finds a way to rule against decades of precedent, always in line with their personal political hobby horses \u2014 often without even explaining themselves! \u2014 is how the perception of Supreme Court legitimacy sank to an all-time low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Roberts and company could easily write, \u201cI wish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act wasn\u2019t the law, but it is and this Court has long held it constitutional, so this is a matter for Congress to change if it decides.\u201d That\u2019s what a judge would do. A political actor, on the other hand, would join Callais v. Louisiana<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Speaking of \u201cwithout even explaining themselves,\u201d Roberts whining about the public misunderstanding the Court\u2019s decisions lands at a particularly ironic moment. The New York Times<\/em> just published the leaked memos<\/a> revealing how Roberts took the Court\u2019s emergency docket and reimagined it as a political blunt instrument to block liberal policies without having to concoct a written justification<\/a>. Using a tool that only Supreme Court nerds ever cared about to exercise the power of a superlegislature without the scrutiny made for a tidy little racket. Until the public started to notice<\/a>, and now Roberts has to put on his \u201cdisappointed in us\u201d face.<\/p>\n

But rather than more scolding, if Roberts didn\u2019t want to be seen as a political actor, he could consider explaining these decisions. But while lipstick is cheap, getting it on the pig is still hard.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not simply part of the political process, and there\u2019s a reason for that, and I\u2019m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAs much as is appropriate,\u201d feels like a slip. It\u2019s not a truth the public needs to grasp, it\u2019s a position that an appropriately disengaged and docile public should accept. John Roberts uses his year-end reports comparing critics of the Court to cross burning<\/a>. It\u2019s like when Roberts can\u2019t even convince himself that we\u2019ll believe his \u201capolitical\u201d nonsense, he tries to bully us into being ashamed that we\u2019ve noticed. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOne of the things we have to do is issue decisions that are unpopular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bad faith and unpopular are not the same thing. Recognizing that the First Amendment protects Nazi marches is \u201cunpopular\u201d but an even-handed conclusion based in law. There is a hypothetical justice \u2014 willfully shutting themselves off from history and nuance \u2014 that could embrace an absolutist position on Equal Protection and declare affirmative action unconstitutional\u2026 but that justice would, in theory, not turn around and call racial profiling \u201ccommon sense<\/a>.\u201d The animating rule of this Court\u2019s race jurisprudence is that racial discrimination is bad when it inconveniences white people and fine if it brutalizes minorities. America allows \u201cunpopular\u201d to stand in for \u201cprincipled\u201d far too often \u2014 sometimes unpopular things are unpopular because they\u2019re actually wrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just race either. The majority declared it a dangerous assault on religious freedom for a public school to teach kids to respect their LGBTQ classmates, and turned around to bless a state mandating that every classroom display a specific sectarian translation of the Ten Commandments<\/a>. A Democratic president invoking explicit statutory authority to forgive student loans is an unconstitutional power grab, a Republican president arbitrarily impounding congressionally allocated funds gets approved without comment on the shadow docket. It\u2019s all Calvinball with the twist that Republican policy initiatives always win<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even the decision to strike down Trump\u2019s tariffs \u2014 a genuine result based on the clear constraints of the statutory text \u2014 only sided against Trump because the Republican Party\u2019s free traders wanted the result. And even that was a split decision among the conservatives. <\/p>\n

Clarence Thomas just gave a speech claiming progressives are incompatible with America<\/a>. Sam Alito flies insurrection flags<\/a>. Neil Gorsuch has been on Fox News multiple times this week<\/a>. Meanwhile, liberal justices suggesting the Court made an ill-considered decision are made to apologize<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court ruled that Trump could use the military to assassinate political rivals<\/a>. Can we just stop with the fucking gaslighting?<\/p>\n

Ken White of Popehat fame has taken to calling Roberts \u201cTemu Taney,\u201d which is a great line, but might be too generous. History won\u2019t remember Roberts as a cheap knockoff of Roger Taney. Roberts comes as the new and improved luxury model. Taney with better PR! Even now, there are mainstream outlets willing to pretend he\u2019s a centrist \u2014 the man who managed to keep mainstream legal reporters calling him a centrist while he oversees the dismantling of America\u2019s constitutional order.<\/p>\n

But as his defenses of the Court grow more frequent, it suggest is that he knows the facade is cracking.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post John Roberts Dismayed Public Sees Supreme Court As \u2018Political Actors\u2019 Just Because They\u2019re Political Actors<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(Photo by Alex Wong\/Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that Chief Justice John Roberts loves more than stripping Black people of meaningful voting rights, it\u2019s playing the disappointed dad act with the public. Over the last several years, Roberts has fed the media manicured sound bites as a reluctant scold, chastising the public for not understanding the Supreme Court\u2019s very important work<\/em> and getting pre-occupied with unimportant trifles like \u201cjustices taking hundreds of thousands of dollars under the table<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s just so TRAGIC that people care more about the Supreme Court erasing decades worth of civil rights as opposed to the real<\/em> threat: hurting the Court\u2019s public approval rating.<\/p>\n

At the Third Circuit judicial conference, Roberts was at it again.<\/p>\n

Roberts defended the Supreme Court from what he characterized as the public\u2019s unfortunate misconceptions<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI think at a very basic level, people think we\u2019re making policy decisions, [that] we\u2019re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides. I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don\u2019t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes, how could anyone mistake the Supreme Court\u2019s conservative majority for \u201cpolitical actors\u201d mere days after throwing aside decades of well-settled law to rewrite the nation\u2019s election laws<\/a>. A move that the Supreme Court took only<\/em> after Democrats in California and Virginia responded to Republican gerrymandering efforts, creating a new political crisis for the Republican Party<\/a> that didn\u2019t exist over the prior 61 years. After all that time, the majority decided it was so obviously unconstitutional that they had to rush out a decision in the middle of an active election and waive its longstanding rules to make sure other states get their new maps in under the wire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One has to wonder if Roberts prepared this speech expecting that decision to come later.<\/p>\n

If the public views a Supreme Court staffed by justices who previously worked on stifling the 2000 Florida recount<\/a>, drafted DOJ memos plotting to disenfranchise Black voters<\/a>, or married Big Lie activists<\/a>, as \u201cpolitical\u201d that\u2019s quite accurate<\/em> really. It\u2019s not that the justices can\u2019t have political preferences \u2014 that\u2019s the nature of the process at this point. But it\u2019s one thing to be an advocate and another to be a judge. The fact that this Court consistently finds a way to rule against decades of precedent, always in line with their personal political hobby horses \u2014 often without even explaining themselves! \u2014 is how the perception of Supreme Court legitimacy sank to an all-time low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Roberts and company could easily write, \u201cI wish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act wasn\u2019t the law, but it is and this Court has long held it constitutional, so this is a matter for Congress to change if it decides.\u201d That\u2019s what a judge would do. A political actor, on the other hand, would join Callais v. Louisiana<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Speaking of \u201cwithout even explaining themselves,\u201d Roberts whining about the public misunderstanding the Court\u2019s decisions lands at a particularly ironic moment. The New York Times<\/em> just published the leaked memos<\/a> revealing how Roberts took the Court\u2019s emergency docket and reimagined it as a political blunt instrument to block liberal policies without having to concoct a written justification<\/a>. Using a tool that only Supreme Court nerds ever cared about to exercise the power of a superlegislature without the scrutiny made for a tidy little racket. Until the public started to notice<\/a>, and now Roberts has to put on his \u201cdisappointed in us\u201d face.<\/p>\n

But rather than more scolding, if Roberts didn\u2019t want to be seen as a political actor, he could consider explaining these decisions. But while lipstick is cheap, getting it on the pig is still hard.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not simply part of the political process, and there\u2019s a reason for that, and I\u2019m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAs much as is appropriate,\u201d feels like a slip. It\u2019s not a truth the public needs to grasp, it\u2019s a position that an appropriately disengaged and docile public should accept. John Roberts uses his year-end reports comparing critics of the Court to cross burning<\/a>. It\u2019s like when Roberts can\u2019t even convince himself that we\u2019ll believe his \u201capolitical\u201d nonsense, he tries to bully us into being ashamed that we\u2019ve noticed. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOne of the things we have to do is issue decisions that are unpopular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bad faith and unpopular are not the same thing. Recognizing that the First Amendment protects Nazi marches is \u201cunpopular\u201d but an even-handed conclusion based in law. There is a hypothetical justice \u2014 willfully shutting themselves off from history and nuance \u2014 that could embrace an absolutist position on Equal Protection and declare affirmative action unconstitutional\u2026 but that justice would, in theory, not turn around and call racial profiling \u201ccommon sense<\/a>.\u201d The animating rule of this Court\u2019s race jurisprudence is that racial discrimination is bad when it inconveniences white people and fine if it brutalizes minorities. America allows \u201cunpopular\u201d to stand in for \u201cprincipled\u201d far too often \u2014 sometimes unpopular things are unpopular because they\u2019re actually wrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just race either. The majority declared it a dangerous assault on religious freedom for a public school to teach kids to respect their LGBTQ classmates, and turned around to bless a state mandating that every classroom display a specific sectarian translation of the Ten Commandments<\/a>. A Democratic president invoking explicit statutory authority to forgive student loans is an unconstitutional power grab, a Republican president arbitrarily impounding congressionally allocated funds gets approved without comment on the shadow docket. It\u2019s all Calvinball with the twist that Republican policy initiatives always win<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even the decision to strike down Trump\u2019s tariffs \u2014 a genuine result based on the clear constraints of the statutory text \u2014 only sided against Trump because the Republican Party\u2019s free traders wanted the result. And even that was a split decision among the conservatives. <\/p>\n

Clarence Thomas just gave a speech claiming progressives are incompatible with America<\/a>. Sam Alito flies insurrection flags<\/a>. Neil Gorsuch has been on Fox News multiple times this week<\/a>. Meanwhile, liberal justices suggesting the Court made an ill-considered decision are made to apologize<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court ruled that Trump could use the military to assassinate political rivals<\/a>. Can we just stop with the fucking gaslighting?<\/p>\n

Ken White of Popehat fame has taken to calling Roberts \u201cTemu Taney,\u201d which is a great line, but might be too generous. History won\u2019t remember Roberts as a cheap knockoff of Roger Taney. Roberts comes as the new and improved luxury model. Taney with better PR! Even now, there are mainstream outlets willing to pretend he\u2019s a centrist \u2014 the man who managed to keep mainstream legal reporters calling him a centrist while he oversees the dismantling of America\u2019s constitutional order.<\/p>\n

But as his defenses of the Court grow more frequent, it suggest is that he knows the facade is cracking.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If there\u2019s one thing that Chief Justice John Roberts loves more than stripping Black people of meaningful voting rights, it\u2019s playing the disappointed dad act with the public. Over the last several years, Roberts has fed the media manicured sound bites as a reluctant scold, chastising the public for not understanding the Supreme Court\u2019s very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":150601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Headshot-300x200-rwLhVg.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}