You didn’t have to love me like you did but you did, but you did. And I thank you
By 
Steve Vladeck mentions it in the post Paul links below, but some rather critical context for Roberts not being willing to go the full Alito the morning after the not-technically-State-of-the-Union:
The exchange was so awkward, it should have been followed by the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song. While President Donald Trump was shaking hands down the aisle, exiting the House chamber after his address last night, network cameras caught him as he turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” Roberts, whose back was to the camera, then headed for the exit.
We can’t know precisely what the president meant, but Trump does have a lot to thank Roberts for. After all, the chief justice and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court helped rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, completely gutting the ban on insurrectionists holding office in order to allow Trump to run for president again following his attempt to seize power by force after the 2020 election. Then Roberts and the other conservative justices manifested an absurd, imperial grant of presidential immunity, with no textual basis in the Constitution, to shield Trump from criminal prosecution, and in so doing set the stage for a despotic second term during which Trump will try to ignore court efforts to impose limits on his power.
In fairness, Roberts has not been as supplicant as some of his colleagues. He has been willing to occasionally refuse Trump demands; this morning, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the three Democratic appointees in declining to overturn an order from a lower court to unfreeze $2 billion in USAID funding. The underlying dispute here is more high-stakes than it might sound; the Trump administration is publicly, though not yet in court, claiming the right to usurp Congress’s constitutional authority over spending, which, if sustained, would bring the country closer to dictatorship. The dissent was so unhinged that one might conclude that there are only five votes on the Supreme Court to uphold the basic constitutional structure. But even though Roberts went against the president on this occasion, he is unlikely to be a reliable check on Trump’s lawlessness. Trump may well have more to thank Roberts for in the future.
It takes someone of Trump’s vulgarity to, in this case, actually point out the truth. In Trump v. US, the Court was not (as Gorsuch pompously insisted) “writing for the ages,” it tailored a bespoke immunity suit for Trump specifically, and it’s impossible to imagine anything remotely like it being excreted had a Democratic president been in the White House. And it’s hard not to wonder if Roberts wouldn’t have continued to try to run out the clock on the Trump administration paying its contractually obligated debts had Trump not said the quiet part loud on national TV.
Indeed, for another example of Roberts’s lawlessness, you have to go all the way back to…yesterday. Erik already covered one aspect of yesterday’s EPA ruling, its illustration of the frequently dismal and fundamentally reactionary state of governance in too many blue jurisdictions. But it’s worth re-emphasizing that the Court’s holding is that the Clean Water Act does not permit the EPA to require that shit not contaminate a city’s water supply:
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court substantially weakened federal limitations on raw sewage discharge into nearby bodies of water. Its 5–4 decision will, in practice, free cities to dump substantially more sewage into rivers, lakes, oceans, and bays, degrading water quality standards around the country. The majority achieved the goal by rewriting a key provision of the Clean Water Act that has, for decades, protected Americans against dangerous pollution. With that guardrail gutted, the majority effectively greenlit the mass release of human waste into the nation’s water supply. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained in dissent, the court “offers nothing to substantiate” its “puzzling” conclusion—nothing, that is, besides evident sympathy for polluters and callous apathy toward those who will suffer from its decision.
[…]
How does the majority reach this upside-down conclusion? With a sleight of hand so clumsy that it would fail to impress a kindergarten class. The Clean Water Act, Alito wrote for the court, authorizes the EPA to place any “limitation” on sewage discharge. But, according to the dictionary, a “limitation” is a “restriction or restraint imposed from without”—that is, a specific direction on how to limit wastewater imposed by the EPA. By demanding that water meet certain, measurable quality standards, the EPA mandates “a particular end result” without saying exactly how it “must be achieved”—that is, the EPA is placing the onus on San Francisco to “figure out what it should do” and impose a restraint on itself. The “direct source” of this restriction therefore “comes from within,” not “from without,” and thus cannot qualify as a “limitation.”
This argument does not even round up to logic. It is, as Barrett put it in dissent, “wrong as a matter of ordinary English,” and utterly “contrary to the text” of the statute itself. “The entire function” of the law “is to ensure that permitted discharges do not violate” acceptable water quality standards, she wrote. “Why would that broad authority not allow EPA” to tell cities that “they must not cause or contribute to a violation” of those standards? Surely, this instruction qualifies as a “limitation.” After all, “it is commonplace” for “limitations” to state “that a particular end result must be achieved” without specifying precisely how it must be achieved. For instance, “a doctor could impose a ‘limitation’ on a patient’s diet by telling the patient that she must lose 20 pounds over the next six months, even if the doctor does not prescribe a specific diet and exercise regimen. And an airline could impose a ‘limitation’ on the weight of checked bags, even though it does not tell passengers what items to pack.”
The textualists!