A Laughable NYT Op-Ed

[Don't read this with breakfast: you may snort your coffee with laughter or vomit.]
The Times edit board gets their panties all in a bunch over the specter of the justices of the Roberts Court, you know, judging. According to them, the Court is composed of "four very conservative justices, four liberals, and a moderate conservative, Justice Anthony Kennedy, hovering in between." That strikes me as an unfairly balanced composition - how about four conservatives, a moderate, and four liberals? I would hardly qualify Roberts as "very" conservative, and would only qualify Alito, Scalia, and Thomas as such on certain issues; and by very conservative I also mean in tune with the Constitution. Details, details.

Especially juicy are these paragraphs:

It is striking how conservative the court is now. On race, it was for decades a proud force for racial integration. Last term, it ordered Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to stop their voluntary efforts to have children of different races attend school together. The court, once an important force for fairness in American society, now routinely finds dubious legal excuses to deny relief to criminal defendants, consumers and workers who have been mistreated.

The Roberts bloc has not adhered to any principled theory of judging. Its members are not reluctant to strike down laws passed by Congress, as critics of “judicial activism” are supposed to be, or reluctant to overturn the court’s precedents. The best predictor of how they will vote is to ask: What outcome would a conservative Republican favor as a matter of policy?

I suspect by "conservative Republican" they mean anyone to the right of MoveOn.org. Oh and since when is the law supposed to be fair? It's supposed to be the law, which isn't crafted with an eye towards fairness.

And they ignore a category of people that have been mistreated in recent rulings: landowners. As in Kelo v. New London. But in that particular case, the majority was composed of Kennedy, Souter, Breyer, Stevens (opinion) and Ginsburg. They also accuse the court of being hyperpartisan (which calls to mind a Safire column from years ago about the overuse of the word hyper as a prefix)...but begs the question of why the decades of legislating from the bench wasn't hyperpartisan?

I know some people wring their hands over the influence of the Times, but I have to imagine to the majority of Americans this stuff comes across as it really is. Laughable.