If you want my take on Roberts and what motivates him, please see this.

One big exception to the behavior by Roberts that I describe there, however, was his later ruling in Dobbs, where he voted with the conservative majority to overturn Roe.

Kate and HC-68 – Some court watchers have suggested that Kagan has burned a portion of her credibility with the 6 conservatives by swinging so hard to the left in the Trump era.

— Bauxite

Maybe…but this touches on another important issue.

We do not have six conservative Justices. This is critically important. We do not even have six reasonably Constitutionalist Justices.

The actual SCOTUS breakdown is 3 hard-core libs (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson), and four more-or-less conservatives of one flavor or another (Thomas, Barrett, Alito, Kavenaugh), with Gorsuch as a conservative-more-often-than-not, and then there is John Roberts.

The 6-3 ruling could in theory have survived a defection by Gorsuch, Barrett, Thomas, Kavenaugh, or Alito. Except that I very strongly suspect that if such a defection had happened, then Roberts would also have flipped and turned it into a 6-3 defeat for the ‘good guys’.

Why? Good question. I’m basing it simply on Roberts’ overall track record. He has a record of voting with the conservatives, except when it really counts.
Most (in)famously on his Obamacare ruling, that basically reversed all the arguments the program’s defenders had used to pass it in order to avoid striking it down on Constitutional grounds.

In this case, him crossing over by himself would just have made it a 5/4 ruling and affected nothing, so it wasn’t an issue either way. If one of the right wing justices abstained or crossed over, I suspect Roberts would have as well.

Then there was his facially nonsensical claim that:

We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.

— Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts

If he really, truly believes that, he’s out of touch with reality and not competent to hold the status he holds.

I doubt he really believes it, I think he said it because he sees himself as a defender of the judiciary, trying to restore its reputation and status. But he can’t do that in today’s political climate. We’re too divided for that.

As for his tendency to vote with the left when it counts, there have been all kinds of theories about the why of that, from blackmail to secret ideology, but nobody really knows. My own suspicion is that like a lot of GOP Senators, he hopes to wait out Trump and MAGA and return to the old status quo, though your guess is as good as mine why.

I don’t think it’ll work out that way.

I truly don’t understand it.

obama made it clear ‘fundamental transformation’ is the watchword, specially those institutions that still work must be destroyed, or reformed to serve their priorities, Art Science, the relations between men and women, should go by the fire

it is only a threat to democracy, when they are under the microscope, otherwise its standard operating procedure, did they conjure up the Biden
Rule, the gang of eight, that determined how any changes to the court must go,

“This can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stuck for the years that it takes to go through a normal process,” she said.

Burning credibility, indeed.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/06/28/justice-kagans-own-words-just-exposed-the-lefts-hypocrisy-on-nationwide-injunctions-n4941256

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/template-saturday-june-28-2025-c

they seem to subscribe to the notion that insanity is the default state,

like O’brien, two and two are five in their calculus,

Kate and HC-68 – Some court watchers have suggested that Kagan has burned a portion of her credibility with the 6 conservatives by swinging so hard to the left in the Trump era.