End of Supreme Court Term (October 2014 - June 30, 2015): analysis and critical comparisons [excerpt of Bill Blum's article at TruthDig]

The Supreme Court has spoken: Obamacare will survive, and same-sex marriage is the law of the land.
Has the court under the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. lost its ideological marbles and, gasp, turned liberal? That’s the billion-dollar question observers of the high tribunal are asking in the wake of the tumultuous October 2014 term.
The answer, though complicated, is that the court’s drift to the left has been exaggerated by cheerleaders on both ends of the mainstream political spectrum. Here is the first of five takeaways from the current term to help explain - - -

According to a detailed report published June 23 by The New York Times, two days before the ruling (King v. Burwell) on Obamacare was announced, the court was on track to conclude its most liberal term since the heydays of the Warren Court in the 1950s and ’60s. The Times’ article was based on the findings of the Supreme Court Database, an analytics-based research project that uses criteria developed by political scientists to evaluate and code the court’s decisions.

With the release of Roberts’ majority opinion in King and the opinion on same-sex marriage the next day, alarm bells were sounding on the American right, with the chief justice bearing the brunt of the opprobrium.
“Roberts = Souter,” tweeted campaign consultant Matt Mackowiak, founder of the ultra-right Potomac Strategy Group, referring to former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a Republican appointee who compiled a surprisingly moderate record during his tenure on the bench.
Roberts “is now just the water boy for the welfare state,” tweeted the unremittingly hysterical Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, ratcheting up the heat another notch.
Extending the metaphorical social-media lynching of Roberts still further, Fox Business Network anchor Charles Payne bloviated in his tweet of the day that the King ruling was “another giant step toward Banana Republic.” Although unspecified, Payne clearly had in mind the form of government at one time prevalent in Latin America, not the retail clothing chain.
And not to be outdone, Presidential candidate Ted Cruz—the Texas senator whom I have sometimes compared in my own Twitter account to the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., in both physical appearance and vitriolic rhetoric— called for a constitutional amendment that would subject Supreme Court justices to periodic judicial-retention elections in order to “restore the rule of law.”
The reality, of course, is that Roberts is neither the second coming of David Souter nor, even more so, Earl Warren. With few exceptions—notably, the King decision and last year’s unanimous ruling in Riley v. California that shielded arrestees from warrantless searches of their cellphones—Roberts is what he has always been: a reliable conservative who nearly always votes in line with his backward-looking brethren Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. In fact, according to the statistics compiled by Scotusblog.com, Roberts voted in agreement with Scalia during the current term at an 83 percent clip, higher than his agreement rate with any other member of the panel.
Any question as to Roberts’ right-wing bona fides were laid to rest June 26 with his dissenting opinion in the court’s landmark 5-4 ruling on gay marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges. Penning a dissent, Roberts channeled his own version of Ted Cruz, condemning the Obergefell majority’s endorsement of same-sex marriage as an outrageous form of judicial activism, arguing:
“As a result [of the majority ruling], the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/scotus_wrapup_5_takeaways_from_the_supreme_courts_current_term_20150629