'No shame': Experts explain why one Supreme Court justice went 'full MAGA'

Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts went "full MAGA" this term because he got tired of feeling lonely, one legal expert contends.

Lawyer and Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick argued Monday that the conservative justice bucked his institutionalist roots and walked the party line because he wanted to hang out with the other Republicans on the court.

"It’s almost like he got tired of being that fourth lone guy who would hive off and vote with the liberals," Lithwick said. "He wants his court back, and so he’s gonna take it back by being them."

Lithwick made this claim after the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent that mandated courts must defer to government agencies’s legal interpretations, dismantled the statute of limitations that protects federal agencies from corporate lawsuits, and ruled Donald Trump enjoyed presidential immunity when he pressured the Justice department to help him challenge the 2020 election.

Law professor Steve Vladeck said Monday he was surprised to see Roberts in those decisions ruling aside conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

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"I’m struck this term by how much he just didn’t care," said law professor Steve Vladeck. "There’s opinion after opinion where, instead of trying to actually build any consensus, John Roberts just basically threw his lot in with the Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch wing. And that’s a really big deal."

Vladeck argued Roberts' slide away from judicial institutionalism — an approach that seeks to protect public confidence in the court and efficient administration of the system — leaves a crucial gap in the court:

"If Roberts isn’t going to be an institutionalist," he asks, "who is?"

Lithwick believes Roberts' transition to the conservative side represents not a philosophical change, but a political one.

"The court has structurally arrogated all this power but feels no shame," she said. "They are perfectly comfortable telling us how we’re going to regulate drugs now."

Their regulatory comfort outraged Slate courts reporter Mark Joseph Stern, who noted a humiliating mistake Gorsuch made in his opinion blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to limit ozone pollution.

Gorsuch mistook nitrogen oxide, the pollutant that makes smog, with nitrous oxide, Stern noted.

"That confusion resulted in an opinion that repeatedly purports to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate laughing gas in upwind states," Stern said.

"If you needed a clearer illustration of why the Supreme Court should not be seizing these deeply in-the-weeds policy decisions for itself, you couldn’t find a better one than that."