Of course the Supreme Court has been politicised

Someone sure is getting on Sam Alito’s nerves. Mr Alito, of the six-member conservative majority on the Supreme Court, recently huffed to the Wall Street Journal that while people are free (“it goes without saying”, he said) to criticise the justices’ reasoning, “saying or implying” the court is becoming illegitimate “crosses an important line”.

It would be wrong to criticise Mr Alito for not specifying where that line lies. He is probably America’s most famously reluctant specifier of lines, having scorned the Supreme Court’s own efforts to do so in his withering decision, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, that in June struck down the right to abortion as established almost 50 years ago by Roe v Wade. His predecessors who supported Roe never had “cogent” or “principled” arguments for the lines they drew between the rights of a pregnant woman and those of an unborn child, he wrote.