Not Great At Politics

 Jon Chait makes the point that John Roberts is, in his words, the "last Republican politician." His argument is that despite Roberts' famous assertion/lie that as a judge he will only "call balls and strikes" Roberts is deeply aware that the Court's legitimacy is not set in stone. As a result, we have gotten a somewhat mixed bag of decisions, some protections for voting rights, while culture war issues have largely gone rightwards.

As Chait and other have noted, the conservative supermajority on the Court is not a result of democratic legitimacy. You could make a case that Roberts and Samuel Alito were appointed after Bush won reelection, even if Bush's initial election was undemocratic, being a minority president. Certainly the three judges that Trump appointed are all tainted with undemocratic roots. 

The Republican policy agenda is largely unpopular. Certainly Dobbs is incredibly unpopular, which undermines Chait's point that Roberts is making political calculations about which precedents to overturn. In fact, it's increasingly clear that several of the more strident decisions of this last session involve cases that the Court probably should not have heard in the first place. The "religious freedom" to be a bigot and student debt cases both have very real problems with standing. The plaintiffs really had no case to begin with. The Roberts Court took on cases that are likely to be pretty unpopular with voters under 50 simply because they wanted to.

I suppose there's a political calculation that voters are always more liberal when they are young and become more conservative as they age. We saw a little of this with Gen X in the last election moving a bit rightwards. However, this isn't a case of changing your mind about tax rates or regulations. This is about some basic civil rights and when you build up antipathy towards a party when voters are young, it's unlikely to be easy to change their minds later.

It's unclear how the GOP escapes what is looking like a demographic collapse. Sure, they can rely on red states remaining crimson red. Epistemological closure will makes sure that the millions of Americans alternately numbed into complacency and stirred into outrage by the Right Wing Wurlitzer will remain loyal to the Republican Party. 

But those Red States are hollowing out, and the residents that remain will, in fact, vote out Republicans, as Kansas has done at the gubernatorial level. DeSantis' latest "immigration policy" will drive all sorts of workers out of Florida and imperil the economy of his state. 

The culture war red meat won't pay the bills.

So, as the GOP doubles and triples down on drag queens and hating on Black and Brown people, their ability to actually govern is increasingly so weak as to be imperceptible to the instruments of science.

Roberts the politician is giving the GOP a handful of victories and thinking he is preserving the legitimacy of the Court. I'm not so sure he's right.