Haven't seen this story talked about here much, but it seems our not so esteemed SCOTUS Chief Justice was having a major sad this summer in the wake of the negative reaction to his preposterous ruling granting FPOTOS virtually unlimited immunity for all his 'official' acts as President -- even when it came to trying to overthrow our constitutional form of government by overturning the results of the 2020 election.
There have been major stories about this carried in CNN, TNR, NYT and elsewhere, but I'll focus on the one by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:
John Roberts Knows He Lost the Public. Does He Care?
... Roberts, according to observers, “was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.”
...
The chief justice was meant to be the one with the savvy to understand the stakes for the court and the country. But Roberts has either developed a tin ear when it comes to public opinion, or—more worrying still—he has not just “frozen out” the liberal justices, as Kantor and Liptak [NYT] put it last month, but has actually frozen out any feedback or media sources that might have warned him that the public mood was not going to be welcoming of near-blanket immunity from a coup-fomenting president, even if that decision came trussed up in magisterial language about the separation of powers and the safeguarding of the “unitary executive.”
...
At minimum, the fact that the new John Roberts may be tuning out any of the voices that are critical of the high court’s current public approval trajectory would explain why he has failed absolutely to take seriously the ethics violations of his colleagues; failed to show up for congressional hearings when summoned; and even seemingly failed to concern himself with the court’s nosediving public confidence numbers... cc
And once you have lost your ability to read the room—because you think the room is full of liars, whiners, and liberal operatives—you are going to keep misjudging how much rank partisanship the American public will tolerate.
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