There’s been so much dramatic news about the Supreme Court in recent days that it’s easy to miss some of it. Indeed, the action has been so intense that there are signs that some of the protagonists may be becoming almost unhinged. Consider, for example, the recent behavior of Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Grassley, who has served in the Senate for thirty-five years (he is eighty-two years old), is running for a seventh term in a state where his crusty persona and strong constituent service have long made him a political institution. His problem is that, like many Republicans, he’s having a hard time explaining why he will not even give a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court. In defense of his position, Grassley gave a speech on the Senate floor that was close to breathtaking in its intemperate incoherence. The speech was an extended attack on Chief Justice John Roberts, who had recently expressed the unexceptional view that the Court should stay out of partisan politics as much as possible.

Grassley scolded Roberts, saying, in effect, that if the Chief Justice himself had not become so political in his decision-making, the Court would be a lot more popular.

“The confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the Court itself has drifted from the constitutional text and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences,” Grassley said. “In short, the Justices themselves have gotten political.” Grassley’s grievance was with two cases in particular, in which Roberts wrote opinions upholding the Affordable Care Act, in 2012 and 2015. Those apostasies from the conservative party line have turned Roberts into a pariah among congressional conservatives, even the Chief Justice’s onetime friend Ted Cruz.

This hostility to Roberts comes in the face of the Chief Justice’s down-the-line conservatism in nearly every other case of his decade in office. Roberts joined the majority in Citizens United and in Shelby County (which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act), and he dissented in Windsor, the case that invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell, which brought same-sex marriage to all fifty states. The decisions Grassley disagrees with are “political,” whereas the ones he likes are, presumably, just good judging. The crudeness of Grassley’s attack on Roberts, from a senator who claims to want to avoid a politicization of the court, is astonishing.

Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, asked a question at an oral argument for the first time in more than ten years a few weeks ago. He put a quick end to speculation that this might be a sign that he was seeking to rejoin the mainstream of the Court in an opinion earlier this week in Evenwel v. Abbott. In that case, which was decided 8–0, the Justices turned away another of the many efforts by conservatives, in the past decade or so, to weaken the voting rights of minorities and Democrats. In an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which was joined in full by six Justices, the Court approved a voting-apportionment process—currently used by every state—that requires all legislative districts to have an equal number of people. Conservatives had demanded a system where states could require districts of equal numbers of voters, so state legislators could ignore the numbers of non-citizens, children, disenfranchised felons, and others not eligible to vote in every district.

The Court was unanimous on the merits, but Thomas wrote a separate opinion that showed how extreme and out of touch his views are. In it, he challenged fifty years of consensus at the Court on voting rights by rejecting a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Prior to its 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr, the Court had declined to intervene in the apportionment process, so Southern (and some other) states drew district lines that discriminated against minorities in egregious ways. Urban districts, with many black people, would be represented by one legislator, and rural districts, with just a few white people, would be represented by one as well. The Court responded to this obvious injustice by finding that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, courts must require that districts be drawn according to the principle of one person, one vote. No Justice has challenged this basic idea.

Now Thomas has done so, writing that the Court “has failed to provide a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle because no such basis exists.” His opinion excavates, as Thomas often does, his understanding of what James Madison intended when he wrote the Bill of Rights. In Thomas’s view, this history amounts to an almost total abdication by the Framers in favor of the rights of the states. By ruling that the Constitution requires the states to follow a one-person, one-vote principle, Thomas writes, “the Court has arrogated to the Judiciary important value judgments that the Constitution reserves to the people.” In his opinion, Thomas ignores racial discrimination—and thus the central reason the Court, in the nineteen-sixties, imposed the one-person, one-vote rule. Thomas’s blindness to the realities of American life—and concomitant obsession with his understanding of the Framers’ intent—reflects his bizarre jurisprudential views. Not even Samuel Alito, the next-most-conservative Justice, joined Thomas’s opinion in the Evenwel case. In Congress and at the Court, it seems, it’s the season for extremism.