It is time to admit what this court has become: an elite, but no less sadistic and vulgar, bastion of the anti-pluralist, anti-democratic forces that have captured so much of the Republican party and the conservative base. To say that the court is composed of partisan operatives " and that at least two of them are either so delusional that they have lost touch with reality or so cynical that they don't mind when the facts diverge from their preferred outcomes " is so obvious as to be almost banal to any honest court observer. That anyone pretends that the court is a legitimate judicial body is a farce. That its actions still carry the force of law is a tragedy.

"And the story is still one in which the Alitos are affirmatively voicing their partisan loyalty in public," the author points out, "and showing themselves unable to tolerate even the proximate presence of Americans who do not share their own morbid, conspiratorial and punitive worldview."

But asking why Alito feels he can get away with it misses the point: he knows he can get away with it. The justice is perfectly aware that he does not need to pretend to neutrality, or hide his partisan loyalties, or behave, with anything like a convincing effort, like his work on the court is motivated by the law and not his own reactionary political preferences. Alito knows that he does not need to maintain any pretext of integrity, intellectual commitment or seriousness in his work. The supreme court has accumulated enough power to itself " and the justices have done a sufficiently good job of insulating themselves from any accountability or consequence " that he doesn't even think he needs to lie any more. He's comfortable being a partisan operative right out in the open.