The most recent and significant Supreme Court decisions have created hysteria pretty much where one would expect. They have also reignited examinations into the mind and philosophy of Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts has been the target of a great deal of disapprobation during his tenure, from both the left and the right. He has been despised by the left since being nominated by President George W. Bush, and stupefying then-Sen. Joe Biden during his confirmation hearings, saying in response to a soliloquy from the Senator that his role if appointed Chief Justice would be “to call balls and strikes,” not to proactively advance a social agenda. Just so.

The ire from the right came later, when it was discovered he applied that formula evenly. It hit a fever pitch when Roberts joined the liberal wing of the court in upholding key provisos of Obamacare. The vitriol was resurrected in 2020 when Roberts forged a majority to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order overturning President Barack Obama’s executive order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — not because he didn’t think Trump had the authority, but because he had not bothered to even try to do so in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act.

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Meanwhile, there is no shortage of decisions by Roberts which have earned him the contempt of progressives, leading to frenzied declarations ad nauseum of the “illegitimacy of the court,” and President Biden saying last week “this is not a normal court.” I assume he meant that as a pejorative.

Consider the two big decisions from last week. In the first, the Court found Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated both the 14th Amendment and title’s VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in applying racial considerations in admissions – the SCOTUS-sanctioned practice known as “affirmative action.” Few Supreme Court diktats in its 231-year history have created as much confusion as the Court’s baptism of affirmative action, which permitted exemptions to the law which forbids discrimination on the basis of race by issuing an injunction to discriminate on basis of race. In this instance, mainly against Asians.

The Court decided correctly this time. Roberts wrote in his majority opinion “the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.” He goes on to say, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” If one day those words are etched on a memorial to the Chief Justice, a man can hardly ask for a better epitaph.

The other case was the Court’s striking of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme. What the affirmative action case did for the principle of equality under the law, this one does for separation of powers. The administration was trying to argue the $430 billion expenditure through the cancellation of student loans was permitted under a post-September 11th law which allows the Department of Education to “waive or modify” terms of student financial aid “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” Roberts, again, eruditely pointed out “The Secretary’s plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions only in the same sense that’the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility – it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.”

So what do these decisions, in light of all of his others, tell us about Chief Justice Roberts? They tell us he is what a jurist is supposed to be: an institutionalist, bound not to create law or reshape society, but to apply the rules evenly, as they are written and intended. Roberts’s conservatism is of a consistent, classical Burkean mold, entirely befitting his role as a jurist. One can quibble (as I have, rather presumptively) with his specific legal reasoning on this issue or that, but he is, prepensely and instinctively, not an idealogue. The greatest conservative philosophers of the 20th century – Russel Kirk, Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott and their ilk – despised the idealogue, herein defined as one who rigidly clings to a programmed course, refusing to be swayed by experience, logic, or reason. Historically and generally, but no longer exclusively, a creature of the left, such rigidity reduces one to being something of an automaton, and risks reducing the courts, as it does other segments of society, to little more than gladiatorial arenas for competing automatons.

John Roberts, as a conservative jurist, refuses to be thus reduced. The Court, and the nation, is better for it.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.