Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has emerged as one of the most ideologically aggressive in decades, and its rightward trajectory is usually attributed to this simple fact: a majority of the justices are very conservative. Today’s Court contains, according to one study, four of the five most conservative justices to sit on the bench since FDR; Anthony Kennedy, the putative swing vote, is in the top ten.

But having covered the Court for 15 years, I’ve come to believe that what we’re seeing goes beyond ideology. Because ideology alone would not propel the justices to effect such massive shifts upon the constitutional landscape, inventing rights for corporations while gutting protections for women, minorities, and workers. No, the real problem, I think, is that the Court as a whole has gotten too smart for our own good.

The current justices are intellectually qualified in ways we have never seen. Compared with the political operators, philanderers, and alcoholics of bygone eras, they are almost completely devoid of bad habits or scandalous secrets. This is, of course, not a bad thing in itself. But the Court has become worryingly cloistered, even for a famously cloistered institution. Every justice is unavoidably subjected to “public deference” when they ascend to the bench, as I heard Sonia Sotomayor describe it at a conference last June. Now, on top of that, today’s justices filter out anything that might challenge their perspectives. Antonin Scalia won’t read newspapers that conflict with his views and claims to often get very little from amicus briefs. John Roberts has said that he doesn’t believe that most law-review articles—where legal scholars advance new thinking on contemporary problems—are relevant to the justices’ work. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Scalia’s opera-going buddy, increasingly seems to revel in, rather than downplay, her status as a liberal icon. Kennedy spends recesses guest-teaching law school courses in Salzburg.

Before the Affordable Care Act cases were heard in 2012, aspiring spectators lined up for days (mostly in vain, because seats are so limited). Meanwhile, this Court goes to considerable lengths to keep itself at oracular remove. The texts of many of the justices’ speeches are not publicized. Cameras and recording devices remain barred from oral arguments, and protesters may not even approach the spotless white plaza outside. But the most symbolically potent move came in 2010, when the justices closed off the giant bronze doors at the front of the building, above which the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW are engraved. Today, the public must enter the building from the side, beneath the marble staircase, through dark, narrow entrances feeding into metal detectors. It is a fitting setup for a Court that seems to want neither to be seen nor to really see us.

Paradoxically, the Court that has gutted minority voting rights in Shelby County and limited women’s access to birth control in Hobby Lobby has never looked more like the country whose disputes it adjudicates. It includes three women, an African American, the first Hispanic, two Italian Americans, six Catholics, and three Jews. On the federal bench, President Obama has appointed more women, minorities, and openly gay judges than any president in history.