When Andrew and Bill title this newsletter, "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior", they are in fact shifting the Overton window in real time: This is how the frog gets boiled, and this is where Orwell's prescient discourse on language is highlighted.

What is described here is clear: Chief Justice Roberts models the response of — not an institutionalist but — a judge, that is, someone who is expert in deconstructing facts, applying laws and statutes, and, when necessary, filling the gaps where existing rules cannot be decided. This is the job of a judge, and the Supreme Court justices are the most important judge positions in the country.

Chief Justice Roberts also demonstrates cognitive responsibility: He explains his state of mind, when he disagrees, he justifies his statements to motivate his belief — and this is reflective of his professional approach, which, naturally as a judge, requires explaining his thought process in every case.

Alito's response betrays that he is not a judge. This is someone who does not know how to follow causal inference properly, or how to apply deductive reasoning — which is elementary for a doctor in law. He is someone who rather than starting from our shared set of facts, is drawing from a completely different set, for instance "They really can't be compromised" in reference to "fundamental differences" (Chief Justice Roberts models what an appropriate response would look like, so I won't comment further). Furthermore he says "return our country to a place of godliness" when our country was founded on the right of each and everyone of us to experience "godliness" in their own way, and Catholics were not just a minority but one that was for a time reviled, and here is a Supreme Justice completely clueless about the history of his own country, unlike, you will notice, Chief Justice Roberts.

So from this conversation alone, one would assume: Chief Justice Roberts is a lawyer who became a judge and, Alito is... something else.

The closest one can get to describe Alito is a process mistake: He is someone who Congress mistakenly let in, because based on the ability to reason he demonstrates in this conversation, this is not someone you want as the ultimate umpire of the US legal system.

So back to the beginning: We should be calling this out! We should be describing Alito as out of his league, we should be describing Alito as incompetent in his lawyering skill and question his ability to serve effectively as the supreme authority.

Instead, a title like "Roberts the Institutionalist, Alito the Culture Warrior" makes it sound like this kind of behavior is just one variety of different kinds of Supreme Court Justices. It legitimizes Alito's incompetence by passing it as competent ideology.

Whatever Alito's partisan beliefs are, Chief Justice Roberts (whose beliefs are likely similar) models how you can have partisan beliefs, but still be professional in terms of applying rules like a judge is supposed to do.