Linda Greenhouse has noticed "a meme in conservative media" that liberals are using the idea of the Supreme Court's "legitimacy" to flip John Roberts to the liberal side.

She says, in "Who Cares About the Supreme Court’s ‘Legitimacy’?" (NYT).

“There’s a wooing going on,” David French warned in National Review in March under the headline “The Temptation of John Roberts.” His focus was not the census case but abortion and the Mueller report. “According to this construct,” Mr. French wrote, “it’s Roberts the ideologue who would vote to restrict abortion rights. It’s Roberts the conservative who would back the Trump administration. But a chief justice who cared about the institution of the Supreme Court? Well, he guards Roe. He checks Trump.”

In The Wall Street Journal last month, under the headline “John Roberts’s ‘Illegitimate’ Court,” the newspaper’s editorial columnist, William McGurn, wrote: “For those not fluent in modern Beltway, let us translate: It’s a threat, aimed at John Roberts. If the chief justice does not produce the desired progressive outcome, the Roberts court will find itself attacked as institutionally illegitimate.” This week, The Journal’s editorial board took aim at the new development in the census case under the headline “Census Target: John Roberts.” “Whenever you read ‘legitimacy’ in a sentence about the court, you know it’s a political missile aimed directly at Chief Justice John Roberts.”...

[T]he steady flow of right-wing commentary mocking concerns about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy (and I readily admit to having added my voice to those concerns) leaves me with this thought: What about the other justices? Why is it assumed on the right that Chief Justice Roberts is the only conservative on the court who has its welfare in view and who worries about the loss of public confidence if the justices come to be seen as mere politicians in robes?

Maybe the question answers itself....

No, the question shouts out, I'm not the question!

And the "right-wing commentary" is not "mocking concerns about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy." Everyone on the Court is concerned about its "legitimacy," a concept that includes, among other things, a lot of fretting about whether the Court will be perceived as deserving the power it wields, which is, ironically, a very political concern.

"Legitimacy" is a category of rhetoric, and everyone uses it. The most frustrating thing for liberals is that non-lawyer people tend to think that the conservative approach to constitutional interpretation is the right way to do it and that the liberals seem to want to use the courts as an alternative to the legislative process.

The wooing of Chief Justice Roberts that Greenhouse quotes is an effort to get the legitimacy talk working in the liberal direction. It's not a new subject. It's a big, long, old conversation.