...The focus on Roberts is unsurprising, said Curt A. Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice. Although the jury is still out on Trump appointee Brett M. Kavanaugh, the justice who replaced Kennedy, Roberts is the conservative most likely to be in play, Levey said.
“I think it is a predicament for him,” Levey said. The chief justice is the member of the court most sensitive “to what history and the nightly news says about you.”
Levey recently wrote that proposals from Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress to restructure the Supreme Court — increasing the number of justices, for instance, or trying to impose term limits — are better seen as attempts to push Roberts to more moderate outcomes in the court’s decisions.
“Such a shift, after all, is progressives’ only real hope of avoiding a conservative majority,” Levey wrote...