The editors of the New York Times today adopt, without serious criticism, the embarrassingly bad arguments of Chief Justice Roberts in favor of a judicial pay increase (which I criticized here the other day). They even flesh out the weakest part of Roberts’s argument into something he either meant to imply but was afraid to say, or that he didn’t mean to say or imply at all. Referring to his argument that departures from the federal bench threaten life tenure, therefore the independence of the judiciary, therefore the quality of justice, the editors write: “Considering the impact on a future job could make judges less willing to issue unpopular rulings upholding important rights.” But given the multiple job opportunities that surely await federal judges if they choose to resign, it’s hard to imagine any judge who wasn’t unethical in the first place succumbing to the temptation to slant his rulings in favor of a prospective future employer. And if this was Roberts’s point, he offered a deeply disturbing judgment on the ethics of his colleagues in the third branch of government. I wonder whether he would endorse the Times’ gloss on his argument.

Then the Times’ editors suggest a grand compromise, a “comprehensive bipartisan package” that would give judges the pay raises Roberts wants, in return for a ban on “privately financed junkets” for federal judges. Those “junkets” are also known as privately funded, fully disclosed educational seminars where judges work harder than anyone merely on vacation, and advance their knowledge of matters that come before their courts. They represent no breach of judicial ethics in principle, nor in practice so far as anyone has ever shown. Banning them would be a serious mistake.

Trust the Times, though, to think that we can make up for the defects of a bad argument by adding a wholly bad idea to the mix.