Analysis: John Roberts doesn’t want to hear any dissent about his Supreme Court

Chief Justice John Roberts may not be able to control the Supreme Court’s current public image and his colleagues’ off-bench behavior. But the tactical Roberts fully defined the court’s impact on American law in the session that ended Friday.

The biggest cases? He wrote them, from those covering campus affirmative action, to rules for voting districts, to executive branch power over student-loan relief. And he wrote them in a way that further amassed power for the court itself.

For Roberts personally, however, that wasn’t enough.

In a highly unusual move, he took issue on Friday with dissenting colleagues and broader criticism of the court.

“It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary,” he wrote in the 6-3 student-debt relief case. His labored phrasing belied his characteristically lucid prose.

Then, referring to his reasoning that invalidated the White House’s plan to help some 40 million borrowers, Roberts said, “We have employed the traditional tools of judicial decisionmaking in doing so. Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis – in fact at least three do. We do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and the country.”

Justice Elena Kagan countered with a dissent dripped with ridicule.

The court majority, Kagan declared, “makes itself the decisionmaker on, of all things, federal student-loan policy. And then, perchance, it wonders why it has only compounded the ‘sharp debates’ in the country?”

Roberts may try to defuse tensions among the nine, but he is inevitably raising them by a series of polarized decisions,…