This was your court, John Roberts SCOTUS-watcher Dahlia Lithwick comments on the dilemma in which the Roberts court finds itself. Choose your clichéd metaphor: painted itself into a corner, hoisted on its own petard, shot itself in the foot, chickens coming home, etc. Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife are just one court soap opera. The fact that conservative funders expend lavish sums to sustain the pair in the style to which they’ve become accustomed makes it clear that both the Federalist Society and SCOTUS conservatives believe justice goes to the highest bidder. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection is on its way to D.C. Thomas will surely not recuse himself from that and other Jan. 6 cases involving players with which his spouse Ginny is closely aligned. This is an imperial court, Lithwick writes, and conservative justices don’t care that we know: Also in the coming months, with public mistrust for the integrity and character of some of the justices at record lows, the justices will have to help the public understand why they should be trusted to engage in sober, principled deliberations of thorny questions when reporting shows that at least some of them take 10 minutes to read 98 pages, that decisions in major cases are ends-driven and political, and that a couple of them are more than willing to distort the record to cover up for that fact. In the coming months, the public will have to…