The “least dangerous” branch—as Alexander Hamilton famously and really, really wrongly called the judiciary—is a little less dangerous, at least for the time being, thanks to the five members of the mighty Mount Holly, New Jersey, Township Council. Their unanimous vote, taken shortly before Thanksgiving, settled a civil-rights case that was to be heard today in the U.S. Supreme Court. In place of this morning’s oral argument, you will hear—if you listen closely—a slow hissing of steam as it escapes from the ears of the conservative justices, who have just lost an opportunity to do to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 what they did, in the last term, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965: detach its teeth. It’s no doubt a double disappointment, because the case also provided a chance to kick around Congress—a pastime, and something of a project on the rightward reaches of the bench.

Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action concerned racial bias in housing policy—specifically, the township’s determination to redevelop a blighted community in such a way that the new homes would cost more than its poor, and mostly African-American and Latino, residents could afford. The case raised the question—long thought settled—of whether the Fair Housing Act bans policies that, however neutral on their face, disproportionately harm minorities. As a doctrine, this goes by the name of “disparate impact,” and its importance to a wide range of civil-rights laws, from employment to education, indicates why the Court’s conservatives seem so eager to introduce it to the business end of a gavel. (Last year a similar case, from St. Paul, was also settled on the eve of argument.)

As a group of former members of Congress argued in an amicus brief, a “straightforward reading” of the Fair Housing Act—both as it was passed in 1968 and as it was amended in 1988—makes clear that disparate-impact claims were intended. If there were any doubt, such claims have been upheld in the appellate courts in all eleven circuits. Yet until the New Jersey settlement, the doctrine was looking pretty well doomed. Disparate-impact liability has long been a focus of conservatives’ distaste for most civil-rights laws, and it maps neatly onto the right-leaning justices’ unconcealed contempt for Congress: its practices, its prerogatives, its stated (or plainly apparent) intent. All this would surely have been on display in today’s argument, just as it has been, consistently, in the arguments and opinions of the Roberts Court. “Overt denigration” is how one Supreme Court advocate described it to me.

Earlier this year, Justice Antonin Scalia used the argument in Shelby County v. Holder, the voting-rights case, to revisit a favorite theme: that whatever the issue, members of Congress are driven only by the basest, most self-interested motives. To Scalia, the fact that the Senate, in 2006, voted 98 to 0 to extend key provisions of the Voting Rights Act for a quarter century was evidence only of cravenness. The higher the vote count, the greater skepticism it warrants. “Not a single vote in the Senate against it,” Scalia said in disbelief. “And the House is pretty much the same… I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement…”

“Even the name of it,” he added, “is wonderful: the Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?”

Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect Supreme Court justices to hold Congress in higher regard than the rest of us do. President Obama’s job-approval rating may have fallen to forty-one per cent in recent polls, but this is a number that Congress, mired in the single digits, can only dream of. Forty-one per-cent approval, for Congress, would be a national group hug. We hate Congress. It’s what we do. Hating Congress is one of the few things we still do together, as one America, now that we no longer watch the same TV shows at the same time. Why should judges feel differently? During the October government shutdown, when Richard Kopf, a senior U.S. district-court judge, told Congress (on his blog) to “go to hell,” comparing its members to a giant hot-air balloon named “Pigasus,” wasn’t he speaking for you and me?

Probably so. But when judges carp about Congress, there is more to it than the common, throw-the-bums-out complaint. Judges like Kopf have a long list of institutional grievances against Congress, starting with sequestration, which cut three hundred and fifty million dollars from the judicial-branch budget, slashing operations—federal marshals, courtroom security, public defenders, and mental-health screenings and drug testing of the accused and the convicted—across the board. For conservative Supreme Court justices, meanwhile, an abhorrence of Congress reflects a knee-jerk distrust of the institution itself, its reach and its role in our democracy.

In Scalia’s case, this is personal. It goes back to his time as an assistant attorney general in the Ford Administration and its battles over executive privilege and secrecy. “It was such a wounded and enfeebled Presidency, and Congress was just eating us alive…,” Scalia recalled in a recent interview by Jennifer Senior of New York. “It was a time when people were talking about ‘the imperial Presidency.’ I knew very well that the 900-pound gorilla in Washington is not the Presidency. It’s Congress. If Congress can get its act together, it can roll over the president. That’s what the framers thought.” And that, he said, “will be the source of tyranny.”

The same sentiment permeates Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion, in 2012, on the Affordable Care Act. The Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan has described it as “probably the most grudging opinion ever to uphold a major piece of legislation,” and that seems about right. While holding that the A.C.A. falls within the congressional power to tax, Roberts yanked it out of the scope of the Commerce Clause, echoing right-wing ruminations about federally mandated broccoli-eating, and citing James Madison’s fear of a Congress “everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” (One hopes the Chief’s clerks confirmed that this line really is from The Federalist No. 48 and not from Disney’s 1979 sci-fi thriller “The Black Hole.”)

“It is not our job,” Roberts wrote in his haughtiest passage, “to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” But in the name of restraining Congress, his court is doing exactly that: second-guessing regulation of the health-insurance market (the A.C.A. opinion, which crippled Medicaid expansion), overriding ninety-eight senators’ judgment that federal protection of the right to vote is still required (Shelby County), and perceiving, despite every expression of congressional intent, only naked self-interest behind campaign-finance reform (Citizens United and its progeny, McCutcheon v. F.E.C., argued in October).

“The Roberts Court has lost faith in the democratic process,” Professor Karlan wrote, noting that the conservative justices, at least in practice, reject the idea that the political branches have a “special institutional competence” in addressing certain questions. In his argument in the voting-rights case, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli tried this line, too, insisting on “the deference that Congress is owed… because, frankly, of the superior institutional competence of Congress to make these kinds of judgments.” This is probably a losing proposition on its face, unless one is talking about Congress’s superior competence at walking in circles with its shoes tied together. But when the legislative branch is not only disrespected but disabled—when the Court waves away the intent of Congress and takes away its tools to redress social and economic inequities—then Congress may well go to hell, and we’re going with it.

Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffShesol.

Photograph by Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP.