Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown University and an architect of the Commerce Clause-based attack on the Affordable Care Act, put it this way in a speech last week to the Heritage Foundation titled “How John Roberts Gave Us Donald Trump”:

But at the very moment he was called upon to teach the American people of the value of their republican Constitution, Chief Justice Roberts asserted the judicial restraint of the democratic constitution and turned them away. And that, my friends, was the end of our constitutional moment. That was the beginning of the end of constitutional conservatism as a political movement. And it kindled the resentment and populism that led to Donald Trump.

“John Roberts Derangement Syndrome” is how Prof. Jack Balkin of Yale Law School, in a post on his Balkinization blog, labeled the attack on the chief justice.

Even before the Trump-focused blame game started, Chief Justice Roberts was well on his way to becoming the political right’s favorite punching bag. In a rambling speech on the Senate floor last month, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee, defended the Republican refusal to move forward with President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to fill the Supreme Court’s vacant seat. Playing off an observation the chief justice had made shortly before Justice Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death, to the effect that the Senate confirmation process had become unfortunately divisive and political, Senator Grassley said it was the Roberts court itself that was political. “Physician, heal thyself,” he said, and then offered this observation:

Justices appointed by Republicans are generally committed to following the law. There are justices who frequently vote in a conservative way. But some of the justices appointed by Republicans often don’t vote in a way that advances conservative policy.

In other words, could it be that the problem with Chief Justice Roberts is that he isn’t sufficiently political in the right direction? That was certainly the message Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas sent last month when called the chief justice “the tip of the spear in playing politics.” In remarks at the Heritage Foundation, he explained: “Chief Justice John Roberts knowingly, clearly and unabashedly rewrote Obamacare twice. What we are seeing is nothing more than naked politics being played by the United States Supreme Court.” (By “twice,” Governor Abbott was referring to the chief justice’s majority opinion last year in King v. Burwell, which saved the statute from a contorted reading that would have stripped the federal government of the ability to set up insurance exchanges.)

In trying to understand how one of the most conservative members of the most conservative court in decades has come to be viewed by fellow conservatives as an enemy of the people, several possible explanations come to mind. Derangement may be one. A mind-clouding obsession with the Affordable Care Act is another.

But something deeper and more systemic is at work here that has little to do with the Affordable Care Act or John Roberts. The scapegoating of Chief Justice Roberts is the clearest demonstration yet of a profound shift in the political polarity of judicial activism. For decades, conservative politicians railed against the “judicial activism” of judges who overturned democratically enacted legislation, accusing such judges of seeking to use the power of the courts to impose their own political and social agendas. It was one of the easiest ways to score political points.