Jonathan Chait writes:

The Republican Party has been in desperate need of a pragmatic leader who can gauge public opinion, shrewdly husband political capital, and advance the party’s agenda in sustainable ways. That leader has materialized in the form of John Roberts. The chief justice of the United States is attempting to navigate the disjuncture between voters, who on the whole are sharply divided but have slightly favored Democrats, and the power Republicans have accumulated through the Supreme Court, which is quasi-permanent and unbounded by any other political branch.

In theory, Republicans could use their hammerlock on the high court to settle a long series of social and economic disputes in their party’s favor. This is the course many conservatives hoped, and liberals feared, the conservative Court would take, especially after Donald Trump was able to seat three justices and pad its right-wing majority. Instead, Roberts has pursued a more cautious strategy, and the question is if this will be enough to shore up the Court’s falling popularity and disarm Democratic threats to overhaul it.

While he has given conservatives high-profile victories on long-standing social divisions like abortion rights and affirmative action, he has also given victories to liberals. In the term that ended in late June, the Roberts Court definitively repudiated the “independent state legislature” theory, which Trump’s supporters had pushed as his vehicle to attempt to overturn the 2020 election and with which other Republicans hoped to enable gerrymandered legislatures to entrench their power. Liberals, having fretted the case was a ticking time bomb for the Republic, exhaled in relief. Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig called the decision “the single most important constitutional case for American Democracy since the Nation’s Founding almost 250 years ago.” More surprisingly, the Court, which under Roberts in 2013 undid a crucial pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, issued an expansive voting-rights ruling that will create more Black-majority legislative districts in southern states, which had previously been free to marginalize Black voters. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh voted with the Court’s three liberals in these recent cases, joined by Amy Coney Barrett in the “independent state legislature” case.

If you were to ask Roberts to explain this pattern, he would no doubt insist he is merely interpreting the law as written. As a nominee in 2005, he famously likened his role to an umpire calling balls and strikes, a conceit he has clung to even as the Court’s reputation for above-the-fray independence has dwindled. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in 2018 after Trump lashed out at a federal judge over an immigration ruling.

But very few people actually believe him. [Continue reading…]