“Any casual observer of the Supreme Court can see what many prestigious constitutional lawyers can’t, which is that the conservative justices are frequently accomplices to Trump’s assault on democracy—a flag signaling support of the January 6 insurrection flew outside Justice Samuel Alito’s house. (Alito, vital specimen of right-wing masculine energy that he is, blamed his wife.) That sort of open partisanship is a bit inconvenient for Roberts, however, who during his confirmation hearing famously compared justices to umpires calling balls and strikes in a baseball game. A more appropriate sports analogy for how Roberts and his right-wing comrades approach cases appeared a few months later, when several referees in the Italian soccer league were implicated in fixing matches for top teams during the 2006 Calciopoli scandal.”
