The world of the law makes so much sense to Adam Cohen of the New York Times. In today’s edition of his invariably simplistic commentary on the work of the Supreme Court, Cohen lambastes Chief Justice Roberts for being a practitioner of judicial restraint when it serves the conservative agenda, and a judicial activist when that will serve the agenda better. In short, he accuses Roberts of result-orientation—a sin Cohen never manages to notice on the left, but that’s another story.

Trouble is, it is Cohen who betrays his lack of interest in legal reasoning, and his own result-orientation. The giveaway comes in his contrast between the Rapanos case decided in June, interpreting the Clean Water Act, and the January ruling in Gonzales v. Oregon, interpreting the Controlled Substances Act. In Rapanos, Roberts joined Scalia’s opinion for the Court declining to defer to the Army Corps of Engineers’ interpretation of what are the “waters of the United States” that it may regulate. In Gonzales, Roberts joined Scalia’s dissent urging deference to the Attorney General’s determination that physicians’ use of prescription drugs to assist their patients’ suicides is not “legitimate medical practice.”

Now, according to Cohen, “[c]ourts are supposed to give an enormous amount of deference to agencies’ interpretations of the statutes they are charged with enforcing.” Fair enough—“enormous” not meaning “limitless,” of course. But without more in the way of legal reasoning, we’d expect Cohen, on this principle, to praise Roberts’s vote in Gonzales and condemn only his vote in Rapanos, right? Wrong. Cohen argues that Roberts got it wrong both times. (Why Cohen beats up Roberts rather than Scalia, the author of both opinions, is a puzzlement. Opportunism seems the most natural explanation.)

Maybe such a view could be sustained if Cohen were to supply legal arguments why a judge should adhere to the deference principle in Rapanos but not in Gonzales. But he doesn’t even try. Instead we get slogans, epithets, and Hyde Park soapbox oration. Scalia’s opinion in Rapanos was “stridently anti-environmentalist,” you see. We know the Corps was reasonable because “four justices agreed with” its view. In the Oregon assisted-suicide case, on the other hand, we had former AG Ashcroft trying to “invoke an irrelevant federal statute”—irrelevant because Adam Cohen says so. Roberts would have “overrul[ed] the voters” of Oregon and “intrud[ed] on state sovereignty.” Bad things to do, if no good ground exists for doing so. But no legal commentator thinks these are principles that trump all other possible grounds for decision-making. (We’ll see whether Cohen objects if his beloved Justice Kennedy puts together five votes in the next few years to bless gay marriage over the wishes of the voters in the “sovereign” states.)

A good case can be made that Roberts was properly deferential in Gonzales and saw the Corps pushing the meaning of the law too far in Rapanos. It’s far easier to see sense in “drugs are for curing, not killing” than in “a ditch miles from the nearest lake or river is part of federally-regulable waters.” But one needn’t defend Roberts’s vote in either of these cases to see that Cohen simply hasn’t borne the burden of making arguments about what the law means. That would seem to be Thing One for a legal affairs commentator at a major newspaper. But for his bosses at the Times, it seems to be enough that Adam Cohen hews to the party line.