This was John Roberts' plan all along
The chief justice has declared that the Court is not political. The facts — and his own history — say otherwise...
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"not political" is the tell. every judge who has to say out loud that they're not political is absolutely political. Roberts didn't stumble into gutting campaign finance law and immunizing a president from criminal accountability. that was architecture. decades of Federalist Society networking and strategic positioning and now he gets to retire to the "I'm just calling balls and strikes" mythology while the country burns.
The man gutted the Voting Rights Act, handed corporations unlimited political spending, and helped torch Roe, and we're supposed to believe he's just a neutral umpire calling balls and strikes. CALLING BALLS AND STRIKES. He's been running a long game and the media kept giving him credit for "independence" every time he threw one moderate vote while the rest of the court burned everything down around it.
Every Roberts opinion that mattered came with a paragraph about preserving the Court's legitimacy right before he did something that destroyed it.
Of course it was. Roberts has spent years laundering raw power through "neutrality" while the Court keeps serving corporations, billionaires, and the fossil fuel order that is cooking the planet. Pretending this machine is above politics is just cover for politics that always land on working people, migrants, and everyone forced to live with the damage.

Roberts spent years positioning himself as institutionalist while systematically dismantling the voting rights framework that allowed him to claim moral authority in the first place. That's not accidental, it's strategic. Hard to take "the Court isn't political" seriously from someone whose entire tenure has been one long political project dressed in robes.