On Wednesday, Chief Justice of the SCOTUS John Roberts came to my home state to give a talk at a judicial conference in Chocolatetown, USA, aka Hershey, Pa., aka about 100 miles south of my current location and a half hour from where I grew up. No wonder I felt nauseous on Wednesday, because the guy who is giving Roger Taney a run for his money for the title of Worst Supreme Court Justice of All Time was so close to me, spreading a lot of bullshit.

As part of his speech to the assembled legal beagles, Johnny Bobs gave a very stern talking to us peons, lecturing that we simply do not understand how the SCOTUS works and how it’s outrageous to say it’s a political body or corrupted.

My no-words response can be found above in the feature image, which is not in fact the cover from a summer catalogue for a boring rich guy outdoor fashion store – head out to the woods in khakis! – but instead a painting of a real event. This work-ish of art was uncovered by ProPublica as part of a story they ran about Grifting Justice Clarence Thomas’s long track record of corruption. It shows Thomas at Harlon Crow’s fancy idea of a campground, Camp Topridge, holding court with Crow and three big-time movers and shakers of the right-wing legal movement, lawyers Peter Rutledge, Leonard Leo, and Mark Paoletta.

However, I have a post to write, so I will expound a little. Despite things like the above painting and a flag associated with White Christian Nationalists flying proudly over the vacation home of Mean Justice Samuel Alito, this week Chief Justice Johnny Bobs sighed and tsked-tsked about all these silly hippies claiming the Supreme Court is a political body. Matt Gertz, not the pedophile former Congresscretin from Florida, had another example of why this was ridiculous:

Neil Gorsuch was on Megyn Kelly’s show today.

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) 2026-05-07T00:22:18.729Z

Those “unpopular decisions” include the gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week and the destruction of Roe. On the killing of Roe, a few of the sitting High Priests who voted to end it had previously told us was “settled law” while under oath during their confirmation hearings. These are not exceptions, as most of their decisions only benefit the right, which you might have noticed.

All this stuff over the last few weeks took me back to the summer of 2018, when Ezra Klein wrote a great piece for Vox about how the Supreme Court was not just an undemocratic body, but actively anti-democratic. Despite Klein noting that even people “most invested in the Court’s grandeur are finding it hard to defend its reality,” there were some howls that he was out of line for what he wrote.

Now, I’m chilly to the current New York Times version of Klein, but his takes on the Supreme Court were always pretty solid, and in this case, he backed it up with a lot of facts and examples, going back to the 2000 election fiasco. There were dismissals of Klein’s argument by those who thought themselves very Reasoned and Wise, that he was overreacting and it was ridiculous to think that the Supreme Court needs any reform.

I have no real feel for whether Roberts truly believes the nonsense he was spewing on Wednesday, or if it’s just another lying grift by the American right where they try to bend reality to their will at the service of corruption. To declare the Supreme Court as not being a council of political high priests with an order to drive America to the right is as absurd as trying to claim Republicans right now aren’t trying to bring back segregation. There really is such a thing as elite leader brain, so perhaps Roberts has existed in such a deep bubble, cut off from the real world, that he believes in a fairy tale world. Or maybe he’s just the corrupt leader of a corrupt body.

After all, Donald Trump said to Roberts after Trump’s State of the Union address last year, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget,” as if he were a boss congratulating a star employee. Maybe that was the point.

To claim the public is wrong because the majority views the Supreme Court as a political body just takes a lot of nerve. It really always has been, or else we wouldn’t put so much importance on who appoints them. And at this moment, five of the six Republican justices were appointed by men who didn’t win the popular vote. Which is to say that we have a super-legislature under the spell of a far-right moronic lunatic (who gave said lunatic all the power he wants) that was installed by a largely random and wildly undemocratic process. To the point where, in the last decade, people were panicking that the country would go to hell if an amazing old lady with cancer died while on the court. Which is exactly what happened.

There really needs to be a wholesale reform of the Supreme Court, and Roberts’ statements on Wednesday point to it being a very difficult, but also a very necessary, fight.

The last word appropriately goes to Spinal Tap.