There’s an Obvious Reason Why The Republican Justices Sound So Nervous

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.  It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Chief Justice John Roberts addressed a judicial conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday and grumbled about the public’s purported failure to appreciate how impartial the Supreme Court is. “I think they view us as truly political actors,” said Roberts, “which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” He lamented the perception that the justices are “making policy decisions” based on their personal views about how “things should be,” as opposed to what “the law provides.” 

He did so exactly one week after the Republican majority on the Supreme Court overrode the plain text of both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution in order to destroy historic protections for voters of color. And about two weeks after the New York Times published internal memoranda revealing Roberts’s strikingly law-deficient rationales for deviating from the Court’s normal processes to block President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy. And about three weeks after Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech in which he denounced progressivism as incompatible with “the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence,” and as “intertwined” with “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao.”

Anyone with a passing familiarity with current events understands that Roberts’s argument — that the public is somehow mistaken about the Court’s function as the judicial arm of the Republican Party — is irreconcilable with reality. Even so, multiple justices are currently making the same claims. On May 6, for example, The New York Times published an interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch in which he emphasized that the Court decides “40 percent of our cases” unanimously. During an event on May 4, Justice Amy Coney Barrett similarly bemoaned the “narrative” that the Court decides “big cases” on party lines, claiming that that view was inconsistent with data, but that it “gets maybe more clicks or more people worked up.”

This raft of assurances about the Court’s impartiality is a continuation of Roberts’s decades-long effort to stave off threats to the Court’s unchecked power. During his confirmation hearings in 2005, for instance, Roberts famously said that “judges are like umpires” who apply rules rather than making them, and he pledged to remember that his job is “to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” In a 2009 interview with C-SPAN, Roberts claimed that the Court is “not a political branch of government” because the public does not elect justices. “If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad,” he said. In 2025, when polling showed that 69 percent of Americans supported term limits for justices, Roberts published a report contending that life tenure has “served the country well.” 

Barrett and Gorsuch are now joining Roberts in insisting to the public, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Court is just fine and there’s nothing to worry about. Their arguments haven’t been especially effective of late. Since Barrett’s confirmation yielded the current six-justice Republican majority in 2020, the Court’s public approval has been below 50 percent. Last year, it fell below 40 percent, for the first time since Gallup started conducting the poll in the early 2000s. And a 2024 AP poll found that 7 in 10 Americans believe the justices are primarily influenced by ideology. 

But it is useful to interrogate why the justices continue to put on their bravest faces and make this case in public. They like making bad decisions, and want to continue doing so unabated. But as more people recognize the reality of the Court, they may, as Barrett put it, get “worked up” — perhaps enough to start taking ideas like Supreme Court reform seriously. The conservative justices’ bet is that by insisting loudly and often that the Court isn’t broken, they can deter the public from demanding that lawmakers fix it.