Leave John Roberts alone!

I doubt there was a single reason for the chief justice’s evolution (I know, conservatives hate that word in the context of Supreme Court justices’ ideological trajectories), but let me suggest one: the breathtaking radicalism of the other four conservative justices. The opinion pointedly signed individually by Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. would have invalidated the entire Affordable Care Act, finding no one part of it severable from the rest. This astonishing act of judicial activism has received insufficient attention, because it ultimately didn’t happen, but it surely got the chief justice’s attention as a warning that his ostensible allies were about to drive the Supreme Court over the cliff and into the abyss. (Extraneous question: Is the liberal love affair with Anthony Kennedy — which should have ended five years ago with his preposterously patronizing opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and suggesting that women are incapable of acting in their own best interests — finally over?)…

If Chief Justice Roberts, nearly a generation younger than Justices Scalia and Kennedy, in fact represents the old form of legal conservatism, in which the judicial role is to salvage statutes if possible rather than eviscerate them in the service of a bigger agenda, that’s a fascinating and highly consequential development.

And it may be just such a fear that explains the anger and angst, the willingness of the leakers — as opposed to disappointed conservatives of an earlier era — to burn the court down in order to delegitimize one whom they happily claimed as their own only weeks ago. The fissures on the conservative side of the court may already be opening over how to approach next term’s big cases on affirmative action (scrap it or confine it) and voting rights (declare the landmark Voting Rights Act obsolete, and therefore unconstitutional, or yield to the nearly unanimous vote by which Congress extended the law’s Section Five for another 25 years).