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Do you mean the current Supreme Court? I don't follow much SCOTUS news in general, but I thought that people felt that this court was doing the opposite of that. They had two landmark rulings within the past two years that both pissed off leftists, hard: Dobbs struct down Roe in 2022, and last year they overruled affirmative action.
Could you clarify? I am likely just not understanding what you mean by political vs partisan, or by political temperature.
There are some leftists who will never be satisfied except by getting the rulings they want. These are the people calling for court-packing today because SCOTUS wouldn't disqualify Trump from the ballot. I wouldn't read that group's attitudes onto all of the left, or the broader electorate.
Broadly-speaking, the Roberts Court has hedged where possible and avoided making controversial decisions. This is why Roberts rewrote Obamacare's mandates as a tax. This is why Masterpiece Cakeshop got decided on technicalities without judging the broader questions of religious freedom and civil rights law. (And the cakeshop in question immediately got sued by activists again.) The affirmative action case you refer to is not the first time the Roberts Court has dealt with the question, and whil they did rule affirmative action unconstitutional, they refrained from making the other personality-based assessments (affirmative action by another name) unconstitutional.
Broadly-speaking, the Roberts court has been much more moderate than it's composition would suggest. Its membership has gone over time from 4-4-1, to 5-4, to 6-3, but this hasn't resulted in noticeably-bolder rulings. The Roberts Court is not using its conservstive majority to enshrine sweeping conservative precedents -- just mild ones.
The underlying problem is that the public has become more divided, and radicalized, and no longer sees what the Supreme Court does as a neutral application of straightforward law. It doesn't really matter what Roberts does, people will treat his legal decisions as political decisions. In some sense he brought this on himself, because many of his decisions are political compromises, and not grounded in a deeper law. But in effect his Court is fairly moderate, especially compared to what would be possible with a conservative majority.
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