Yesterday’s scoffingly farcical explanation for some vile act will be topped by tomorrow’s leaked document.Last weekend, The New York Times published a correspondence among the justices of the Supreme Court leading up to the court’s “shadow docket” decision voiding Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. In it, you can read as Chief Justice John Roberts avoids his colleagues’ unanswerable objections on the way to establishing a new rule to make sure that America’s fledgling and innocent fossil fuel industry wasn’t harmed by the judicial process. You will be unsurprised to note — as legal writer Chris Geidner does, at length and in detail — that all the worry about harms and all presumed procedural necessities have been flipped on their heads over the past year, as the court has enabled Donald Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE’s harrowing of the government, irrespective of sense or statute.This is Calvinball in action.

The term refers to a game played between Calvin and Hobbes in their eponymous comic strip, where each player is entitled to make up any rule they want as they go — a more whimsical and childlike version of “Everyone Is 12,” theory, but with the foundational precepts of, “Everything Republicans do is legal, and everything Democrats do is a crime.” And while there are many more books analyzing the hogwash underpinning “originalism” today than when it was coined, “it’s just Calvinball” is still the proven thesis. Roberts’ reputation has largely skated past what he does for a living. “Originalism” is old enough to vote now — this court’s efforts to prevent that sort of thing from happening notwithstanding — and older than the realization that John Roberts is a partisan goon with a rueful dad face.

It helps that there’s much more connective tissue now between his pre-justice career explaining how to gut the Voting Rights Act and his post-confirmation career of gutting the Voting Rights Act. It also helps that his court voided the 14th Amendment’s section about denying office to people who foment insurrection against the United States in favor of a human cartoon who did it on live TV and spent weeks before and years after playing footsie while bragging about it.The question was always why he would even bother. Owing partisan sympathies at the ownership and upper management level, general cowardice, an over reliance on access journalism to analyze a secretive court and, above all, a failure to grasp the right’s embrace of bad faith and criminal enterprise, Roberts’ reputation has largely skated past what he does for a living.

Judges “calling balls and strikes” was absorbed so wholly into the discursive lexicon, as if commentators were just delighted to have more on-the-job argot, that it smothered any sense of it being a plain lie and sick joke for years after all signs pointed to both. Why blow the whole rigged game now? Why not just retire to collecting six figures for talking to Exxon employees about “character” for 30 minutes at a time?Maybe a guy who has spent his career evading scrutiny for being a party operative wanted to make sure he evaded scrutiny for everything else that comes after the gold watch.

What better way to secure a future free from unwanted questions than by lining up a pardon with a crook who can’t get elected without you? As long as that guy hits the EJECT button at the last second before the impeachment conviction vote is certified, every moment up until then is open road, wind in your hair, driving the country all the way back to Jim Crow.Roberts would have good reason to want to cover his exit. As with so many other avatars of conservative leadership, he and his colleagues have, as rational individuals in exercise of their liberties, exhibited a compelling argument for addressing systemic rot.

Amy Coney Barrett demonstrated her contempt for the franchise as part of the Bush v. Gore squad, Neil Gorsuch comes from a family of GOP lifers, and the rest are crooked enough that the Amish could screw them into a few posts and hold a whole barn together. Roberts himself saw $10 million accrue to the benefit of his household via the headhunting work of Jane Sullivan Roberts, who recruited legal candidates both from the government and for firms that do work before the Supreme Court.

It turns out that there is a deep economic and personal connection between Mr. John Roberts and Mrs. John Roberts. The Constitution specifies that there be a Supreme Court, not this Supreme Court.

That’s the nicest it gets, and we’re all lucky that your uncle who regurgitates Fox News through a thesaurus, Antonin Scalia, has been dead long enough that we don’t have to find how many figures deep he was into kickbacks from the bresaola lobby. Of the l