It’s ok, they’ll have Roberts. He can be the centrist now.
I think his decision will depend on the 2018 elections and on how quickly impeachment advances.
And there goes the Overton window, sliding to the right. Of course, that’s a plus in your eyes, I guess.
Roberts at the center of the Supreme Court instead of Kennedy, yeah, I’d call that a plus.
The Chief Justice is many things, but “centrist” he is not. He might end up in the “center” of the justices if they are strung out along an axis from “conservative” to “liberal”, but that just means the mean will be quite a bit left of the median.
The one thing the CJ likes to do is try for consensus. He sees that as Very Important. So that does tend to pull him occasionally more to the “center” of some issues. But he’s also principled, in that he doesn’t just say what he says because it’s outcome determinative (unlike some current and former justices we could name). So that keeps him pretty well to the right of “center” on most issues.
I don’t think he’s trying to do that. I think he’s sending out the signal that this is as far as he’s prepared to go, and if you go further into the realm of things that the CJ was discussing in his opinion, Breyer will end up on the other side of the result.
And it WAS refreshing to have three separate opinions tell the Chief Justice to stop dabbling in obiter dictum. 
I did not know he had done that. I, too, doubt he would hire clerks, only to retire. He’s a much more principled man than that. I have fond memories of him when he was adjunct faculty at my law school while I was there.