Last fall, in the run-up to the presidential election, a new phrase began to circulate. “Sanewashing” emerged as a term to describe the media’s coverage of Donald Trump, which critics claimed made the rambling, often incoherent statements of the then-wannabe second-term president appear more rational than they actually were. Some argued this was contributing to the “erosion of our shared reality and threaten[ing] informed democracy.”

We’ve now been collectively living in a sanewashed political and legal landscape for nearly a year. For that, we have the Roberts Court to thank.

While its popular origins lie primarily in politics, the sanewashing phenomenon is by no means limited to the political sphere. Over the past two decades, the Roberts Court has pioneered and perfected the practice. Sanewashing—defined as “attempting to minimize or downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public”—has become a prominent, if entirely underappreciated, feature of the Roberts Court.

Relying on judicial sanewashing, the Roberts Court has eroded due process protections, political accountability, and civil rights, while simultaneously consolidating power for itself, corporations, gun owners, Christian conservatives, and state officials who owe their political influence to heavily gerrymandered districts. All this has been accomplished while the Roberts Court has sought to present itself as a neutral, nonpartisan institution, free from corporate interests and policy preferences and guided solely by constitutional and democratic principles. As the Roberts Court has transformed into a conservative policymaking body, it has maintained that it is merely fulfilling its constitutional mandate.

The judicially sanewashed opinions of the Roberts Court haven’t been limited solely to sanewashing the law; often, they also involve extensive sanewashing of the facts too. For example, in tandem with whitewashing the anti-racist purpose of the........

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