When the high court issued orders last week blocking Wisconsin’s voter ID law and stopping enforcement of key parts of Texas’s new restrictions on abortion clinics, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissented. Roberts was notably silent.
Taken together, Roberts’s actions seem to be contributing to a kind of buyer’s remorse that could result in even more pressure for ideologically pure nominees…
“I think there are a lot of conservatives who feel like, instead of calling the balls and strikes, he’s kind of ducking when possible,” said Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network. “There certainly seems like a more consistent pattern on the part of Scalia, Thomas and Alito of being really conservative to the core.”
Morris Davis, a liberal lawyer and former Guantanamo prosecutor, was more blunt in a tweet posted just after the Texas abortion order: “[Chief Justice] Roberts isn’t going to get invited to the tea party this year.”
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