The instincts of John Roberts, who rose in Washington as he served Republican administrations,

have always rested with the right wing.

But now he's much more in a position to be torn between his ideological instincts and his very real institutional concerns

about the third branch and particularly about the Supreme Court.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law and the rule of law in the Trump era.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I covered those things for Slate. And hey, it's 2019 and the government is partially shut down. But the courts remain open.

Actually, with the exception of the immigration courts, which have already

delayed most of their hearings, ironically, contributing to the already massive backlog of delayed

immigration cases, which is the thing we're fighting about, immigration. Now we're seeing cases that

are going to be rescheduled in the thousands. New cases will be delayed.

2019, your couple days in and your name already is irony.

2019 also opened with Chief Justice John Roberts and his annual New Year's state of the

Judiciary Report. It always sneaks in with the new year. This year it was

almost more notable for what it did not say. It certainly did not talk about Donald Trump.

And it did not explicitly say a lot about the thing it addressed, which was sexual misconduct in

the Article III courts. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts, who is determined

to keep the court out of the public eye in these roiling and very dramatic months post-Brett

Kavanaugh is actually quickly becoming the most interesting member of the High Court for what he doesn't say.

So we've now seen him in the last few months with a series of votes to bat away big cases,

intervening in a sealed secret conflict that's coming out of the Mueller probe.

Who is John Roberts? Is he evolving into a

centrist? Is he taking on Trump himself in his own twinkly-eyed, understated way? How did this

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