No sooner did Justice Roberts fetch up in the latest Gallup poll as the most trusted public figure in America than he . . . did nothing. He could have granted a stay in the urgent appeal President Trump filed with the Supreme Court asking the sages to protect his executive privilege from the House committee investigating January 6. Instead the Chief Justice just sat by, perhaps savoring the fact that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans think he’s the cat’s meow.

Is the Chief Justice keeping a judicious silence in Mr. Trump’s case to preserve his newfound popularity? Mr. Trump, following defeats in district court and with the riders of the District of Columbia Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, appealed to the Supreme Court on Thursday. He also applied for a stay directly to Chief Justice Roberts, who could have acted on the application individually if he chose.

We wouldn’t read too much into Chief Justice Roberts’ inaction, however. The case remains on hold pending the full court’s review. One former federal prosecutor, Dennis Aftergut, reckons in Bloomberg Law that “it seems relatively safe to wager on the likelihood that the court will not disturb” the opinion of the circuit court riders. Mr. Trump would thus lose his bid to keep his papers private.

Mr. Aftergut reckons the justices, amid “the court’s current crisis of legitimacy,” might choose to shore up their reputation by “handing Capitol Hill Democrats a victory” in this case, “where the justices’ core beliefs are not at stake.” He suggests that Justice Barrett in particular could be eager to prove the justices are not “a bunch of partisan hacks,” as she said in a speech in September. Justice Kavanaugh might also be susceptible to such reasoning, Mr. Aftergut avers.

The court may also choose to run out the clock, Mr. Aftergut suggests. Better to give Mr. Trump’s case a full airing. The question at hand — whether a Congressional inquiry can breach the President’s executive privilege — “raises novel and important questions of law,” as Mr. Trump’s lawyers contend in their appeal. They say a “properly functioning Executive Branch requires confidentiality in deliberations.”

Chief Justice Roberts has elsewhere observed that, typically, “congressional demands for the President’s information have been resolved by the political branches without involving this Court.” Until a case involving a request from Congress for Mr. Trump’s tax records, Chief Justice Roberts noted last year, “we have never considered a dispute over a congressional subpoena for the President’s records.”

Chief Justice Roberts in Trump v. Mazars USA noted that Presidents may be subpoenaed in criminal proceedings, whether federal or state. The case of U.S. v. Nixon showed that a federal criminal prosecution trumped claims of executive privilege. A president could even be subject to a federal “damages suit and appropriate discovery obligations,” as in Clinton v. Jones.

Yet Chief Justice Roberts suggested that a demand from Congress for the President’s records “is different.” Nor is he worried that the materials Congress was seeking were personal tax records. He goes on to mark a profound point. “The President is the only person who alone composes a branch of government.” As such, there’s “not always a clear line between his personal and official affairs.”

This, in our view, should be a warning sign for the January 6 committee in its dispute with Mr. Trump. The Chief Justice concluded in Mazars that demands from Congress for presidential information “implicate special concerns regarding the separation of powers.” Such demands need to relate to lawmaking — that is to say, “a valid legislative purpose,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.

After all, “Congress has no enumerated constitutional power to conduct investigations or issue subpoenas,” though “each House has power ‘to secure needed information’ in order to legislate.” This reasoning, if applied to Mr. Trump’s case, may disappoint the zealous investigators looking into January 6, and, while it’s not a raison de faire, our guess is that a decision protecting not Mr. Trump per se but the presidency would boost Chief Justice Roberts’ standing atop the Gallup Poll.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.