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Subscribe to RSSOn the rebound… Political Wire: “A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that support for President Obama's health care law rose to 48% after the Supreme Court's ruling that it was constitutional, from 43% before the court decision.”
Let the conspiracy theories begin…
“Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations,” CBS’s Crawford reports. “Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.”
More: “[S]o the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, ‘You're on your own.’ The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said. Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.”
Politico’s Mahtesian: “From Crawford’s piece, you get the sense that Roberts played the politician’s role in the vote – he was the one looking at the angles, considering the historical consequences, and the one thinking about the effect of the decision on the court’s public standing.”
You also get the sense that members of the court, including the arch-conservatives who wouldn’t even sign onto portions they agreed with, are every bit the partisans that members of Congress are.
“Chief Justice John Roberts could have taken down the entire, massive health care law that his fellow Republicans deride as ‘Obamacare,’” the AP writes. “He could have prevented the Supreme Court decision that largely disabled the most disputed aspects of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants. He didn't do either, and in the process surprised (or dismayed) longtime court observers of every political stripe. Those two outcomes in the finals days of his seventh year on the court offer some clues for reassessing what kind of chief justice Roberts is and intends to be. Is he no longer the rock-ribbed conservative loved by supporters and jeered by opponents? Has he become a pragmatic leader mindful of the court's place in history? Is he more canny, but still solidly conservative?”
“Like most minorities, Hispanics traditionally have leaned Democratic,” AP writes. “But a recent Pew Research poll indicates that Hispanics also are the fastest-growing group of independent voters, with 46 percent now shunning a party label compared with 31 percent six years ago. Such results only underscore how diverse Hispanics are and the challenges for the political parties.”
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Don't know, don't care. IMHO, Roberts voted this way because he realized that if it were struck down, the people would feel the hurt from what is lost and the skyrocketing costs, and would then insist on single payer. I do not believe for a single second that Justice Roberts cared about his legacy. If he did, the Citizens United decision would not have been what it was.
It's politics, and not necessarily the left-right kind. Public opinions of the Court are at historic lows precisely because it seems so overtly political - and while you have justices like Scalia repeating Limbaugh and Hannity verbatim, and Thomas collecting money from the forces opposing the ACA - I think Roberts made the political calculation that striking down a duly-enacted law along partisan lines might be the absolute end of the Court's legitimacy. So he looked for a way to uphold it.
I would hope that you are correct, Mark. Someone pointed out that this was the Roberts that testified during his confirmation, and is trying to reverse some of the negative opinion of the court. It could sure use some bolstering.
I also recently heard about an old case from the early 1800s (Maurbury(sp?) vs. ??) which was the first time the court defined it's power to nullify legislation on constitutional grounds.
A switch in time saves nine
You are exactly right...saves 9!
A short time before the decision, Obama applied pressure suggesting an repeal of this law would make "the Roberts Court" an ACTIVIST Supreme Court. This is, of course, malarkey since the commerce clause did not and would not hold.
Instead, Chief Justice Roberts simply "Caved" to the pressure ..... and magically found a way to justify calling it a tax. Chief Justice Roberts had a severe attack of brain cramps with that one, because calling the penalty a tax is illogical.
Of course, it was a penalty first, before it was argued before the Court as a tax, and now Obama's press secretary is calling it a penalty once again. Democrats flip-flopping at an embarassing rate of speed with this law.
[A short time before the decision, Obama applied pressure suggesting an repeal of this law would make "the Roberts Court" an ACTIVIST Supreme Court]
Give it up "jim"...
Roberts "caved"? Do you really think a Supreme Court Justice "caved" to Obama calling it an "Activist" court? Nonsense...just like you thought SCOTUS was going to "stick it to Obama" for the scolding he gave them during his STOU address, right?
If you do, you have much bigger problems then worrying about ACA...much bigger...
Regardless of the semantics, ACA is constitutional, and it isn't going anywhere. Roberts did the right thing.
Time to put on the big-boy pants and deal with it...
What motivated Roberts' decision? The simplest answer is that he based it on his conservative jurisprudence rather than on near term, partisan politics. It was after all, a highly conservative decision. It spoke against an expansive view of the commerce clause, and it also expressed deference to Congress. Conservatives are always complaining about activist judges, and overturning the law for the sake of partisan politics would have been the actions of an activist court.
The law itself, lest we forget, is largely the conservative, Republican, market-based proposal for health care reform, with its well-documented origins in Romneycare and the Heritage Foundation. Republicans only came to oppose the idea of mandated health coverage when the President embraced it, clearly revealing their opposition to be motivated by partisan politics rather than conservative ideology. The only part of Obamacare which the right ideologically opposes is the "Obama" part (an argument can be made for also opposing the "caring" part). It's hard to say they lost when the end result is that they got the plan they originally said they wanted.
Keeping this in mind, there is possibly a political motivation for Roberts as well. He may have actually done the Republicans a favor in the long term by saving their health-care policy. If this had been struck down in its entirety, we'd be back at the previous status quo, a position even less popular and far less tenable than the ACA. Inevitably, rising costs and public outrage would force some action on health reform again. But without the ACA or a similar plan based on personal responsibility, there would be nowhere to go but to the left. Kill the ACA, and your options are a solution so much closer to actual socialized medicine or no solution at all. That's one reason why no Republican has been able to articulate an alternate reform policy; this was their alternative. A Romney backer on Fareed Zakaria's show this weekend actually said he wanted health care policy to go back to where it was in the '50's. That is now their alternative.
If Roberts was looking at the long game of partisan politics rather than the short game, then he may have saved the Republican party from a state of total irrelevance on this issue and also may have saved the country from an actual system of socialized medicine (whether you think that would be a good or a bad thing). Yes, he had to hurt the party's short term goal of beating Barack Obama in 2012 to do it, but as an unelected official, he can afford to look at the long term. After all, though the White House is certainly the highest profile electoral prize, it is a lot less essential to the Republican strategy than Congress and state governments are right now.
@ Nathan - I congratulate you on the best post Ive read yet on the subject! Not only do I concur, but I might try and add that the solicitor general argued precisely in favor of the ultimate ruling on secondary merits. The key as you pointed out, is the "long term" vision, which he brilliantly achieved. The GOP won 3 important victories penned by CJ Roberts - he protected the commerce clause against future attempts to exploit it, he saved the right from the embarrassment of choosing the law's father to litigate the mandate to the electorate in November, (They can now use their favorite boogie monster word "Tax") and the declining integrity of a right wing court and it's legitimacy has been temporarily stayed, leaving it in a strong position to remove other progressive reforms down the road ... And yet they wail and gnash their teeth unaware of these victories!
And now Justice Roberts is getting a taste of the vile vindictive hateful rhetoric the right wing is so famous for. Sad....