Whatever the political leanings of Chief Justice John Roberts, his choice to vote with the Liberal side of the Supreme Court in the ACA ruling was an honorable and brave thing to do. He rose above the fray and followed the rule of law, not the ramblings of some right-wing talking points. I don't agree with all his decisions - Citizens United is an abomination - but in this particular case, he did the right thing.
The fact is, John Roberts has a whole host of new fans and admirers because he helped save Obama's Health Care plan for America. And we won't forget.
My favorite tweet from yesterday, and possibly from all time, was this:
John Roberts is the Severus Snape of SCOTUS.
— Michael Foss (@Fossphate) June 28, 2012
I have no idea if the person who tweeted that was a liberal or a conservative, or whether he agreed with the verdict rendered. They might love Justice Roberts or hate his guts. In a literary sense it works either way because Professor Severus Snape was an ambiguous character up until the end of the Harry Potter series when we saw his true nature. Both sides saw Snape as a traitor, yet he was actually just walking a dangerous line and trying to do the morally right thing under tough circumstances. And at the end of the story, he was the "bravest man" Harry Potter ever knew.
Sometimes that happens in real life. For me, after this ruling, Chief Justice Roberts is a hero like that.
Am I being corny? Perhaps, but listen to Chris Matthews waxing poetic about Roberts yesterday:
Roberts Rules! Let's Play Hardball.
. . . Let me start with one of the great days in this country's history. Today the Supreme Court led by the Chief Justice himself decided that Barack Obama's Health Care Act squares with the American Constitution. All the drum-beating, all the horrors floated up by the right-wing fever swamps are, after today, simply the hate-vapors of the perennial rejectionists to progress, the "rear guard" funded by the Koch Brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Today's Hero ~ Chief Justice John Roberts, who walked to the forefront of history and said yes to progress and and no to the role prescribed for him by the Right. He would not be that man, he would not let the court named for him carry historic blame for denying health care to tens of millions of Americans. He would not be the ramrod for yet another right-leaning partison-appearing Supreme Court ruling that would have been the third strike over the plate following Bush v. Gore and Citizens United. So let's start tonight by looking at this bold, defiant, grand decision by Chief Justice Roberts . . .
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Earlier this week we read Justice Scalia's bizarre dissent on the Arizona Immigration case, in which he went into absolutely Pureblood Death Eater mode while comparing illegal Hispanics in Arizona to freed slaves before the Civil War and those with "contagious diseases." It's easy to see Roberts as the reverse - someone who decided to put the Law ahead of prejudices or his own personal opinions. And indeed, he ruled the opposite of Scalia in that case, as well as the ACA case.
Supreme Court expert and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Linda Greenhouse, wrote about Roberts role in the Immigration decision for the New York Times:, implying that Roberts willingness to go along with the majority might have driven Scalia nuts, LOL:
The first thing that jumped out at me was the name of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Justice Kennedy’s opinion, along with the expected names of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. The chief justice was, apparently, in complete agreement with the majority as evidenced by his silence – the dog that didn’t bark, you might say. He felt no need to write separately to express even a shade of difference from the majority or a hint of sympathy with the dissenting views of his usual allies. Beyond Justice Scalia’s transparent dislike for the president, perhaps it was the chief justice’s apostasy that drove him around the bend.
Yes, horrors that the Chief Justice wouldn't succumb to all the dog whistles in Justice Scalia's dissent. Maybe Roberts just isn't a racist?
About the Health Care Ruling, Greenhouse analyzed Roberts' role which is officially "Chief Justice of the United States."
. . . the title that he actually goes by, chief justice of the United States, seemed a good fit. He spoke for the country.
His decision to call the mandate a tax and to provide a clearly reluctant fifth vote for upholding it as within the Congressional taxing power was a deeply pragmatic call that saved the Affordable Care Act. Certainly by no coincidence, it also saved the Supreme Court from the stench of extreme partisanship that has hung over the health care litigation from the moment more than two years ago that Republican state officials raced one another to the federal courts to try to erase what they had been unable to block.
. . . But it is Chief Justice Roberts’s extraordinary role that is most intriguing. He has just completed his seventh term as chief justice, and at 57 could well serve another quarter-century or longer. Clearly he is playing a long game.
. . . John Roberts doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act. He went to great lengths in his opinion to show his total agreement with the plaintiffs’ core argument: that the requirement to buy health insurance was an unprecedented effort by Congress to force people into a market they had chosen not to enter, to create commerce where none existed. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion pierced gaping holes in the chief justice’s analysis. But he stuck to his position, coming within an inch of invoking what Justice Ginsburg ironically labeled “the broccoli horrible” and warning that “under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables.”
Since there were four justices who also saw the mandate that way, as Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Anthony M. Kennedy explained in an unusually structured opinion that all four signed as co-authors, the mandate might have died right there. But then the chief justice abruptly pivoted and declared that because the penalty for not buying insurance functioned as a tax, it could be upheld as a tax and the mandate was therefore constitutional.
Roberts' law professor, Laurence Tribe, whom you may recall had predicted that ACA would be upheld, praised him on Thursday in the Boston Globe:
“I think this term was the turning point in the legacy of John Roberts,” Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe said in an e-mail to the Globe. “He now has a chance to be a truly great chief justice. Of course, he dissented in some of the liberal-leaning decisions of the current largely conservative court, but when push came to shove he was where he needed to be.”
Tribe, who taught Roberts and President Obama at Harvard Law School, said Roberts’s decision to become the swing vote in a 5-4 decision “saved the day — and perhaps the court.”
In the same article, Joel B. Grossman of Johns Hopkins University said:
“It’s kind of an act of leadership rather than an act of ideology . . . I can’t imagine his sympathies were with expanding congressional power, but I think he recognized that there might even be a crisis if he cut this law off at the knees.”
. . . “He is going to be chief for a long time and one thing you don’t want is to lose control of the court,” he said. “This fits the model of wanting to keep the court together and perhaps even to approve something he personally found distasteful.”
Roberts must have known that the conservatives would see him as a sell-out, shun him socially, and immediately launch ad hominem attacks as bad or worse as those aimed at the President. And in fact, it started in less than 24 hours.
Ben Shapiro, Editor of Breitbart.com launched a series of damning tweets:
This is the greatest destruction of individual liberty since Dred Scott. This is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration.
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
Chief Justice Roberts was the worst part of the Bush legacy.
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
It's not like I didn't call this back in 2005 re: Roberts. Flashback: President Bush's Roberts Pick Disappoints: breitbart.com/Big-Government…
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
I hate pansy Republicans who think that just because SCOTUS rules something, they're right. Try Roe v. Wade. Or Plessy. Or Dred Scott.
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
How dumb is the Roberts opinion? It actually quotes Franklin's "death and taxes" quip as evidence for a legal point.
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
For his next magic trick, John Roberts will turn Obamacare into a butterfly, so President Obama won't have to worry about tax questions.
— benshapiro (@benshapiro) June 28, 2012
Wow. Call a "wahhhhbulance" for him!
Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky took a different route, issuing a Press Release that dissed the entire decision as moot somehow, as if Justice Roberts had no authority to render a verdict. In fact, he carefully doesn't mention Roberts at all, which is telling, and refers to the majority opinion as "couple people" who "declare something." Yeah, the Supreme Court doesn't matter unless they rule your way.
Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional. While the court may have erroneously come to the conclusion that the law is allowable, it certainly does nothing to make this mandate or government takeover of our health care right.
Which caused the Village Voice to retort:
Actually, Rand, that's exactly what makes it so.
. . . Paul may want to review the 1803 case of Marbury V. Madison, which formed the basis for judicial review. In other words, it's what gave the Court its teeth -- it clearly defined the Court's role in the separation of powers in the federal government, making it the "supreme expositor of the Constitution."
This means that what the Court says goes -- regardless of whether a freshman Senator from Kentucky disagrees with it.
Rand Paul had so much criticism over his silly remark that he was still trying to explain in an interview the next day:
Interview From Marketplace Health Care:
Hobson: Well thanks for being here. I want to start by asking you about some comments that you made yesterday that have gotten a lot of attention. You said: "Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be constitutional, does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional." Do you stand by that statement?
Paul: You know, I still agree with Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito that the Constitution doesn't justify the law.
Hobson: You're agreeing with the dissenters -- but that was not the ruling that the Supreme Court came down with.
Paul: Right, but that's all I'm saying, if if you ask Justice Scalia if he thinks the law is Constitutional, he'll still tell you "no." So I'm entitled to have my opinion as to what is constitutional and what is not. No one's talking about whether the ruling has validity or not, I'm just saying that I agree with the dissenters that don't believe the law is constitutional
Okey dokey.
Next . . . the apoplectic and hyperbolic (and repetitive) Rush Limbaugh slamming Roberts as some kind of Evil Taxman out to destroy the world:
What we have been told by the Chief Justice of the Court and four liberals on the court - Obamacare's just a massive tax increase.
. . . the Chief Justice was just hell-bound, hell-bent to find a way to make this law applicable, so you know what? As a tax increase it works because there's no limit on the federal government's ability to tax....
. . . John Roberts said (mocking voice) "It's not our job to forbid this, it's not our job to protect people from outcomes, it's not our job to determine what is right or wrong or any of it. We can't forbid this if it's what the elected representatives and the people want." . . . But what if we were deceived?
. . . What happened today was that we were bludgeoned with a tax that requires us to do what the government mandates. We must do what they say. . . . It is a 'stealth tax' and that's what it was all along. A massive behavior modification program.
. . . Chief Justice says (mocking voice) 'I can't forbid this. It's not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices. I gotta find a way - Congress wants this - I gotta find a way to make it happen. Okay - we'll call it a tax!'
The lowest blow so far has come from extremist radio host Michael Savage who implied that Robert's epilepsy gave him impaired judgment.
Let’s talk about Roberts. I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It’s well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts’ writings you can see the cognitive dissociation in what he is saying.
Oh Lord - "cognitive problems"? Really? Does this also explain Mitt Romney's lack of memory about everything he has ever said?
That statement is nasty two ways - not only is it egregious to bring up the private health matters of a Supreme Court Justice, it's insulting to anyone with epilepsy to imply that they can't make correct decisions. But isn't this just par for the course in Republican circles ~ bad health equals bad judgment equals "no insurance for you"? Don't the Republicans always imply that people with bad health or even children with pre-existing conditions from birth are somehow tainted and undeserving? Unless you're Ann Romney with high-functioning Multiple Sclerosis, or Dick Cheney with a defective heart, or Rick Santorum's poor little daughter, or Rush Limbaugh going blind from drug abuse. Oh yeah - that is irrelevant because they all have plenty of money for the best health care. It's only the poor and unemployed who don't deserve it.
All the more reason we need universal health care so people can get help without regard to their previous conditions or political affiliations. Death Eaters just aren't good at taking care of people. So thank you, Justice Roberts.
