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........

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