A highly unusual outburst occurred at the Supreme Court last week. Thursday morning, after Justice Samuel Alito announced the court’s decision in a case regarding asylum policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read aloud from her dissent. That in itself is a relatively rare occurrence, but part of the court’s tradition.

Once Sotomayor finished, however, Alito broke from decorum to accuse his colleague of catching him off guard. Alito’s outburst was more than just his latest public display of crankiness. It exemplified a far more insidious trend: the conservative justices on the court treating the loss of comity as some sort of outrage, while ignoring the real-world consequences of their rulings. ....

Beyond this linguistic dispute, what is undoubtedly true is that Alito’s decision will prevent legitimate asylum-seekers from receiving the protection the law was intended to afford them. Reading her dissent from the bench, Sotomayor outlined the difficult path many asylum-seekers face and articulated how our current asylum legal framework sprang from the “moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.” She recounted the awful case of the MS St. Louis, when the U.S. refused to accept over 900 Jewish refugees who sailed from Nazi Germany in 1939. More than 250 of those turned away would die in the Holocaust. .....

Yet the conservative justices seem most concerned about perception and process, rather than the tangible impact of their work. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, bemoaned that the leak of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization posed an existential threat to the court’s existence, and indeed, to the country itself. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he fretted. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”

Fortunately, these attempts to influence public perception of the court and avoid blame for throwing millions of lives into tumult are not working; the American people increasingly see through these efforts. Public approval of the court is at historic lows — nearly 60% of Americans say the Roberts Court is “out of touch with the values and beliefs of most Americans,” and 7 in 10 Americans believe the justices put ideology over impartiality.