Lest anyone suppose that the beating Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is taking from Republican candidates might cause liberals to enfold him in a comforting embrace, the current issue of The Nation puts that thought to rest. In a special issue marking the chief justice’s 10th anniversary on the bench, the old-line liberal magazine deplores “the court’s relentless rightward progression” under his leadership, charging that “Roberts has led a narrow conservative majority that consistently favors the privileged and powerful (especially corporations) at the expense of everyone else (especially women, workers, consumers, people of color, and the accused).”

The Republican debate on Sept. 16 brought to the surface for a national audience the grumbling in conservative circles that began when Chief Justice Roberts cast the deciding vote three years ago to reject the first challenge to the Affordable Care Act. His authorship of majority opinion in King v. Burwell in June, rejecting a second and even more contrived attack on the law rubbed salt in a still open wound. Well before then, under the headline “Right Fears Roberts Going Soft,” Josh Gerstein observed a year ago in Politico that conservatives were expressing toward the chief justice “a kind of buyer’s remorse that could result in even more pressure for ideologically pure nominees.”

That prophecy came dramatically to pass during the Republican debate when an organization called the Judicial Crisis Network (it called itself the Judicial Confirmation Network during the pre-Obama years, when its mission was to see nominees to the federal bench confirmed rather than blocked) ran an anti-Roberts spot labeled “No Surprises” that displayed head shots of the chief justice flanked by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and — implausibly — David H. Souter.

The right wrote off Justice Kennedy long ago; speaking of open wounds, he has sat since 1988 in the seat that President Ronald Reagan intended for Robert H. Bork. And for years, “no more Souters” has been a right-wing rallying cry. But John Roberts? The John Roberts whose majority opinion two years ago in Shelby County v. Holder crippled the Voting Rights Act? The John Roberts whose snarky dissenting opinion in June’s same-sex marriage case invited gay and straight Americans to “by all means celebrate today’s decision” while adding “but do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”? The John Roberts who dissented in June when the court granted a stay that has at least temporarily spared the three-quarters of the abortion clinics in Texas that would have had to close as a result of an appeals court decision that has now reached the Supreme Court?