Roberts may want to blunt the anticipated accusations of political partisanship that any right-wing decisions in these cases will likely attract by supporting Obama’s heath care program now. If so, he will have been immeasurably helped by his new enemies in the right-wing media who are painting him as a secret liberal, or as a turncoat villain with a deteriorating mind.It is therefore hard to credit that, only a short time after that contemptuous refusal, Roberts has been converted to a policy of extreme judicial modesty. Most commentators seem to have settled on a different explanation. Recent polls have shown that the American public has become increasingly convinced, by the drum-roll of 5-4 decisions reflecting a consistent ideological split, that the Supreme Court is not really a court of law but just another political institution to be accorded no more respect than other such institutions. Roberts, as Chief Justice, must feel threatened by this phenomenon; the Chief Justice is meant to be a judicial statesman as well as a judge, and it is part of his responsibility to maintain public respect for the Court for being above politics. Perhaps he thought it wise, all things considered, to take the occasion of an extraordinarily publicized case to strike a posture of judicial reticence by deciding contrary to his own evident political convictions.

He might have been particularly inclined to do so in view of the large number of politically charged cases scheduled for hearing next year, beginning in October, a month before the presidential election. The Court will have the opportunity to overrule its 2003 decision allowing state universities to take an admission candidate’s race into account, as one consideration among others, in seeking a diverse student body. The conservative justices might wish to abolish affirmative action altogether, or to impose more stringent restrictions on it.

They will also have the opportunity to reverse lower courts by upholding Congress’s Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids federal agencies to treat gay marriages as real, for example by allowing a gay couple to file a joint income tax return. The Court will be asked to strike down an important part of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which requires states with a particularly bad voting rights record to seek federal permission for new changes in their election laws. Moreover, it may soon find a chance further to constrict or even to abolish abortion rights.

Roberts may want to blunt the anticipated accusations of political partisanship that any right-wing decisions in these cases will likely attract by supporting Obama’s heath care program now. If so, he will have been immeasurably helped by his new enemies in the right-wing media who are painting him as a secret liberal, or as a turncoat villain with a deteriorating mind.