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It was pretty jarring earlier this month when the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court took the bench for the first time since the omicron surge over the holidays. All were now wearing masks. All, that is, except Justice Neil Gorsuch. What's more, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not there at all, choosing instead to participate through a microphone setup in her chambers.

Sotomayor has diabetes, a condition that puts her at high risk for serious illness, or even death, from COVID-19. She has been the only justice to wear a mask on the bench since last fall when, amid a marked decline in COVID-19 cases, the justices resumed in-person arguments for the first time since the onset of the pandemic.

Now, though, the situation had changed with the omicron surge, and according to court sources, Sotomayor did not feel safe in close proximity to people who were unmasked. Chief Justice John Roberts, understanding that, in some form asked the other justices to mask up.

They all did. Except Gorsuch, who, as it happens, sits next to Sotomayor on the bench. His continued refusal since then has also meant that Sotomayor has not attended the justices' weekly conference in person, joining instead by telephone.

Gorsuch, from the beginning of his tenure, has proved a prickly justice, not exactly beloved even by his conservative soulmates on the court.

At his first sitting in 2017, he sought to dominate the argument and repeatedly suggested that a complex case, involving conflicting provisions, was really very simple.

"Wouldn't it be easier if we just followed the plain text of the statute?" he asked over and over. "What am I missing?"

A lot, said his colleagues, both liberal and conservative.

"This is unbelievably complicated," lamented conservative Justice Samuel Alito. Whoever wrote the statute must be "somebody who takes pleasure tearing the wings off flies," he said, provoking loud snickers on the bench.

The court's liberals are upset

Of course, anybody who regularly watches Supreme Court arguments is used to seeing some testy moments in both big and little cases. But you don't have to be a keen observer these days to see that something out of the ordinary is happening.

Some of it is traceable to the new conservative supermajority, including three Trump appointees, a court that may well end up more conservative than any since the 1930s. It's a majority that has evidenced less and less respect for precedent, or the notion of deference to Congress in setting policy.

So it's not surprising that the court's three liberal justices would be upset. It is the degree of the upset, though, that telegraphs something different. When the court in November seemed prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Sotomayor had some well placed verbal jabs at the ready.

Noting that 15 justices over 50 years have reaffirmed the basic framework of Roe, and only four have dissented, she asked this pointed question: "Will this institution survive the stench that this [turnaround] creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?"

At oral argument, Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's best questioners, sometimes takes a different approach. She just shuts down, rather than alienate her colleagues. Still, her anger is often palpable, the color literally draining from her face. And Justice Stephen Breyer on occasion just holds his head.

Neither, however, could contain themselves 12 days ago at the argument testing the government's vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers, adopted under provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Breyer called the challengers argument "unbelievable." And Kagan pointedly observed, "This is a pandemic in which nearly a million people have died, by far the greatest public danger that this country has faced in the last century... and this is the policy that is most geared to stopping all this."

Courtesy NPR

Predictable when the only qualifications - for Gorsuch, Barrett & bbbbbBret - were TOTAL party loyalty and being relatively young.

As for Gorsuch, I thin prick is the word the reader was looking for.