If there’s ever been a strategic thinker on the US Supreme Court, it’s Justice Elena Kagan. So you can be absolutely certain that there was careful thinking behind Kagan’s pointed criticism of the court’s conservative majority in a public interview Tuesday at Catholic University’s law school in Washington.

Kagan’s primary subject was the court’s voting-rights jurisprudence, which makes a lot of sense, given that the US is a couple of weeks from an election. But a close reading of her comments reveals that Kagan has decided that it’s time for the American people to understand the fundamental flaw of the conservative majority’s jurisprudence: Driven by originalism, the conservative justices do not care about the consequences of their decisions.

The voting-rights decisions that Kagan highlighted are indeed terrible, and Kagan dissented in all of them. In the context of her remarks, however, her invocation of those cases is a kind of news hook, an occasion or event that columnists often use to draw in the reader. Kagan’s larger objective is to formulate a sharp, clear narrative of what’s wrong with the conservative majority’s conception of judging. Ideally, if the criticism lands, it might lead some of the conservatives to start caring more about what happens in the real world.

The core of Kagan’s narrative is that the conservative majority “has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” she said. The consequence is “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”

And Kagan made it clear that ignoring consequences is not a mere accident but a direct result of originalism, the dominant conservative judicial philosophy. According to originalism, the justices’ job is not to make sure the current system works well but to apply the Constitution as it would have been applied in the late 1700s. As a result, she explained, originalism itself “is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”This criticism is spot on. It’s subtle, but fairly easy to understand when put the way Kagan did. Willful blindness to real-world consequences really is at the heart of the harm the conservative majority is doing to the country. And originalism really is their most powerful conscious motivation.

Notice, however, that Kagan’s critique is different from the argument commonly heard among critics that the conservatives are just partisan hacks. Kagan works with the conservatives and knows them. Once in a blue moon, she wins some of them over, so there is no reason for her to insult them. She can, however, call them to account for the method they use to interpret the Constitution.

Her criticism is especially devastating because there is no answer to it. The conservatives have no choice but to acknowledge that they interpret the Constitution without reference to the effects of their decisions — because that’s what originalism mandates.

Kagan’s examples were perfectly drawn to illustrate the conservatives’ unwillingness to consider the consequences of their decisions.

Take partisan gerrymandering, which has been in the news for most of the last year. Kagan has long believed that the court should have outlawed the practice. When the court shut the door in 2019 to constitutional challenges to partisan gerrymandering, she wrote a powerful dissent, accusing the majority of an “abdication” of its responsibility to supervise democratic elections.

In her comments this week, Kagan took the opportunity for a little “I told you so,” noting that “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders … making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so.”Making her critique bipartisan was a nice touch.

Kagan also invoked the example of the court’s decisions overturning laws that regulate campaign contributions, putting her criticism in terms of public perception. “The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. Pulling no punches, she continued: “And they’re right.”Kagan cares about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, as she also noted. To give herself a little cover for her criticisms, and to be fair to her conservative colleagues, she pointed out that the court has, in fact, stood up to President Donald Trump on some issues, such as tariffs. She called claims to the contrary “a bum rap” on the court.

Again, Kagan is right. The real problem with the conservative justices isn’t that they’re in the tank for Trump. It’s their insistence that consequences don’t matter. If they gave that up, they would still be conservative, and would still reach some conclusions that Kagan wouldn’t like. But at least the conservative majority would be doing its job, which is to apply the Constitution to a world almost unimaginably different from that of the framers. Elsewhere in Bloomberg Opinion: For more, to our newsletter.