I think the chief justice is saying that there’s a disconnect between what people seem to want from the Supreme Court – answers to the country’s most profound questions – and what the current crop of justices has been trained and selected for – namely, delivering small-bore answers. If you want something more from us, I hear him as implying, then maybe we’re not the justices for you.
If that was his point, it’s easy to find something disingenuous in it. The court, after all, voluntarily undertook to decide the cases that made the June headlines. No one made the justices do it. Maybe the chief justice thought he was doing something minimalist in his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which had the effect of gutting the Voting Rights Act. But that’s certainly not how the decision was received, either by those who deplored it or those who, like Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas, received it with glee.
Could Chief Justice Roberts be saying that the minimalist mantra he invoked, at his 2005 confirmation hearing and since, is not adequate to the task? Is minimalism the light that failed? Don’t forget that this is the chief justice who just a year ago, contravening his own policy preferences and constitutional vision, saved the Affordable Care Act. He took a minimalist route then, construing the health-care mandate’s penalty provision as a tax rather than following his initial inclination to strike it down as exceeding Congress’s Commerce Clause authority.