Conservatives who care about judicial issues — and this should be all conservatives — have long held one cardinal belief about the Supreme Court: John Roberts is “politically unreliable.” Perhaps he was not as much a weather vane as Anthony Kennedy, a similarly doctrinally hazy justice who grew to relish his swing-vote role. But when the chips were down, one of them (and sometimes both!) could be counted on to fail you.
It’s not true, really, at least not in that simplistic way, and obviously untrue now that the Court’s most recent term has concluded with Chief Justice John Roberts voting in the majority on three crucial cases and writing coruscating majority opinions in two of them. Which of course is the danger of interpreting the Supreme Court and its justices’ personal judicial temperaments through a vulgarly political (in the partisan, rather than the institutionalist, sense) lens.
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