For those in need of grim comedy to sustain them during these grim times, there is always the comfort food of cable-news appearances by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a state most noted for its toll roads. When he speaks, what emerges is usually a quotidian mishmash of empty rhetorical calories, a plate of disingenuous nonsense whipped up on the quick. What I do give him credit for is that, behind that unassumingly bland rictus forever set on his face, Chris Murphy is also a master chef of a particular sort of gaslighting inanity. Every now and then he serves it up to us in the classic French style: multicourse.

Thus we have yesterday’s appearance on All In with Chris Hayes, with Mehdi Hasan guest-hosting, on the topic of the Supreme Court’s alleged conflict-of-interest problems. Murphy opens with a baldly false assertion, that Harlan Crow intentionally spent decades as one of Clarence Thomas’s closest friends because he has “lots of cases before the Supreme Court” (he has none), but fear not: This is a mere aperitif of the sort Murphy likes to serve up on his way to the hors d’oeuvre, in this case the casually hilarious musing that “it just doesn’t feel like a coincidence that whenever Harlan Crow’s groups [that he donates to] express an opinion, Justice Thomas sides with the guy that he spends vacations with.” (Newsflash: There is another, vastly more likely reason these things line up, which is that Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow are both very conservative and share judicial philosophies.)

But like any chef who takes pride in his work, Murphy makes us wait for le plat principal, and this main course was so outright bizarre that it deserves to be noted:

Listen, the reason Ted Cruz and Republicans are so out of their minds about protecting the Supreme Court is because the Supreme Court is the new right-wing legislature for this country. Republicans’ agenda is so unpopular in Congress — banning abortion, getting rid of background checks, requirement [sic] eviscerating voting rights laws — that they can’t pass it through the majoritarian institutions and so instead Republicans have outsourced legislating to the Supreme Court. And so when there is a potential they are going to lose their grip on the Court, they get their backs against the wall.

This is an impressive soufflé of lies, projection, and gaslighting as the term is properly understood: as an assertion that up is down, and that the well-known history of Supreme Court jurisprudence since the New Deal simply did not happen. To say this is to ask all but the most mindlessly partisan grunt to lap up a slop-trough full of offal. Murphy’s claim that the Court is the “new right-wing legislature” precisely (and thus one suspects intentionally) inverts the well-understood liberal conventional wisdom regarding the Court’s most valuable purpose prior to the era of conservative majorities: as America’s unelected left-wing legislature.

Progressives have not been shy about this in the past. (The literature is triumphal and voluminous.) Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg freely acknowledged that Roe v. Wade was an act of progressive legislation by the Supreme Court, with no actual underlying constitutional basis, merely eight justices’ presumptuous conclusion that it was right for society. (Ginsburg was disarmingly frank in arguing that both stare decisis and her own personal politico-philosophical leanings thus governed her enthusiasm for the outcome.) If you want to know how progressives viewed the proper role of the Supreme Court when they assumed they would have control of it for the next generation, I advise you to look at Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet’s infamously galvanizing 2016 memorandum: They aimed to use an anticipated progressive majority to shoot the conservative survivors of the culture wars (whom Tushnet likens to defeated Nazis, Imperial Japanese, and Confederates) and declare and disfavored conservative ruling as “wrong the day it was decided.”

Murphy knows all of this, of course. But a master chef does not create recipes from a book, so out comes his next assertion, that with cases like Dobbs the Supreme Court itself was “legislating from the bench.” I cannot emphasize enough how much this gets what happened in Dobbs precisely backwards: It was with Roe that the Supreme Court created a nationally binding law out of thin air where previously the matter had been subject to legislation by the 50 states. Republicans’ agenda may well be unpopular in both Congress and various state legislatures — in fact we are getting recent evidence suggesting just that — but we were never even able to test the theory until now because Roe unilaterally took it out of their hands. The entire point of Dobbs is that it devolves the matter of abortion back to where it belonged in the first place: the state legislatures.

It hardly makes sense to call an act of judicial humility and devolution an act of judicial legislation, but then again Murphy knows to whom he’s serving his patter: Mehdi Hasan would not call out an elected Democrat advancing the centrally approved narrative even if said Democrat were attempting to stab Mehdi Hasan. Murphy ends by projecting progressives’ own anxiety about having lost the Court onto Republicans (while also giving away the game — they’re trying to expand the Court). The final chef’s kiss is that he cannot help but phrase it in terms of how “out of our minds” we are to protect it.

As it happens, Republicans and conservatives are well in their right minds to be concerned about “protecting the Supreme Court,” for the same reason that all people who are capable of seeing beyond the immediate partisan horizon are interested in protecting the judicial branch of government from attempts to radically revise the American constitutional settlement. Democrats are attacking the Court right now because, as the 2024 GOP primary shapes up and Trump begins to look more like the inevitable nominee (and the guaranteed loser in the general election), they anticipate not only four years of the presidency but a window of undivided control in the House and Senate as well. During that time they aim to push through as many radical revisions to America’s economic, social, and political structure as possible. Murphy served us up a whopper this time, and as a man who feasts on absurdity, I thank him for that much. But no matter how outrageously crafted it is — and no matter how bitterly hilarious to the ironically inclined is Murphy’s inversion of heretofore orthodox historical reality of the American judiciary — it still tastes to me like a certain sandwich known from one of Spinal Tap’s most accurate album reviews.