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The author is wrong, and there are some very good conservative legal minds who say so. Roberts may not only have killed Obamacare, but he may have effectively gutted LBJ’s Great Society, and even severely undermined a lot of FDR’s New Deal that still hangs around America’s neck like a millstone.

To start with, he was facing a losing deal, as there is a strong likelihood that Kennedy was going to vote with the liberals, and said so, which meant that the liberals would have the majority, have upheld everything, and written a horrific majority decision that would have been devastating to the constitution.

However, Roberts pulled a fast one. One of the few ways in which a Chief Justice is different from the other Justices, is that *he* determines who writes the majority decision, even if he is not in the majority. But whoever he designates must be from the majority.

So, by joining with the liberals, sort of, he could designate himself to write the majority opinion.

Why does this matter? Because the liberals always vote in lockstep, and even if the decision supporting Obamacare totally undermined Obamacare, they would vote to uphold it. Because they are fools.

Kennedy, however, is smart enough to understand that Roberts undermined the decision, so he did not join the decision, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he did.

But what about the decision itself? Since FDR, the left has pushed through unconstitutional laws by using vague clauses in the constitution that the founding fathers thought were self-evident. These include the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause. Because they were minor clauses, they do not have a lot of checks and restrictions to them.

But Roberts asserted that the Commerce Clause was *not* worthy of what was in effect a tax.

And the founding fathers knew all about taxes, so the power to tax is just loaded with restrictions, checks, safeties, etc. Which means that taxes are very hard to pass and easy to get rid of.

But it also means that a huge amount of laws since FDR that ride on the back of the Commerce Clause are now at risk for being overturned.

And Roberts also used a one-two punch of stating that the states could not be punished for rejecting more than the bare minimum of Medicaid. This lit up statehouses all over the US, and many of them almost immediately said hell no! to the feds demands to increase their Medicaid rolls.

This sucks a LOT of the life out of Obamacare, and when congress changes hands on the 15th of January, the Republicans are going to have a field day slashing Obamacare taxes right, left and sideways.