Who can forget the audacious even bravura performance of John Roberts before the Judiciary Committee and his beautifully delivered defense of stare decisis? In retrospect it was an encomium, of sorts: the confirmation, The Citizens United decision. Legal pragmatism or politics? But does it compare, in it's mendacity and bad faith, to the outright lie of William Rehnquist, as he denied authorship, of a letter he asserted to be the work of Justice Jackson?

http://bclawreview.org/review/53_2/05_snyder_barrett/

The erosion of respect for the Supreme Court is the realization that it is not a legal bulwark, an interpreter of law, but a tool of a careful, respectable legal politicking. Let us connect the present day Originalism, that John Roberts most certainly is an adherent of, to the politically galvanizing Brown v. Board (decided in both instances 9-0) to an indigenous American political romanticism. A destructive, pernicious nostalgia for an imagined past, elided of the conundrum of racism and affirming the moral necessity of patriarchal power. Justice Roberts is Robert Bork scrubbed clean of any taint of the legal margin, the radical fringe of legal thought and practice. Expect the worst in the case of the 'Obamacare' decision, but be prepared for a carefully worded document exuding a cultivated but essentially absent political respectability.

Political Observer