“It is a real danger that the partisan hostility that people see in the political branches will affect the nonpartisan activity of the judicial branch,” he said then, adding: “It is very difficult, I think, for a member of the public to look at what goes on in confirmation hearings these days, which is a very sharp conflict in political terms between Democrats and Republicans, and not think that the person who comes out of that process must similarly share that partisan view of public issues and public life.”

So I can only imagine what the chief justice felt last week when Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, stood next to President Trump and made this public declaration: “The single most significant thing this president has done to change America is the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.”

And assuming, as I do, that Chief Justice Roberts is a close student of public opinion polls, I wonder what he makes of a new Gallup Poll, out last month, showing that for the first time since 2008 more Americans say the Supreme Court is too conservative rather than too liberal. The gap isn’t huge — 30 percent “too conservative” to 23 percent “too liberal” — but the shift in public perception is sudden and significant. In 2015-16, following the same-sex marriage ruling, “too liberal” outstripped “too conservative” with a gap of 17 percent. Gallup’s analysis suggests that the shift may be less because of any specific cases than of public knowledge that Republicans control two branches of government and seem to be in a position to exert heavy influence on the third. In other words, the public is seeing the court and its future not in isolation but in context.

The chief justice also has to know that for the first time in the court’s modern history, the individual justices are ideologically aligned with the party of the president who appointed them. There are no crossovers, no William Brennan or Harry Blackmun or John Paul Stevens, Republican-appointed justices who ended their careers as liberals, and no Byron White, appointed by President John F. Kennedy and a dissenter from the court’s liberal rulings on abortion and criminal procedure. That in itself is cause for concern for a chief justice inclined to worry that people will look at Supreme Court justices and see partisans.

I assume these thoughts were not far from his mind as he mused aloud during the gerrymander argument. And I’d like to suggest that rather than wringing their hands, progressives might take heart. Whatever happens with this case — a harder case than many good-government types have admitted publicly or even privately — there are many more political hot-button cases on their way to the Supreme Court: voter ID cases, racially discriminatory redistricting cases, even other gerrymander challenges litigated under different constitutional theories.

In the recent past, Chief Justice Roberts has seemed to me a bit too openly eager to get the court’s hands on these issues. Twice in the past term, the court decided against taking up highly charged political cases. It let stand lower court rulings that invalidated a voter ID requirement in Texas and that deemed discriminatory a series of voting changes in North Carolina. In each case, the chief justice, writing only for himself, issued statements to underscore that the court was bypassing the cases for essentially procedural reasons and not because the justices agreed with the lower court rulings. These solitary personal statements in the Texas and North Carolina cases served no purpose that I could discern other than to keep up the spirits of the states that would continue to defend their problematic statutes.

The Texas voter ID case is highly likely to return to the court. When it does, and when similar cases arrive at the Supreme Court’s door as the next redistricting cycle grows ever closer, will the chief justice take the court into the fray, or will he think back to what he said to Paul Smith and decide that the court’s interests are best served by sitting it out?