Free Republic

“Obamacare” looks increasingly inevitable, but one lawsuit making its way through the court system could pull the plug on the sweeping federal health care law. A challenge filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation contends that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because the bill originated in the Senate, not the House. Under the Origination Clause of the Constitution, all bills raising revenue must begin in the House. The Supreme Court upheld most provisions of the act in June, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took pains in the majority opinion to define Obamacare as a federal tax, not a...

WASHINGTON, - Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts told a Maryland coffee shop cashier he was the victim of credit card information theft. Roberts, who normally pays for his morning coffee with a credit card, paid with cash Tuesday and explained to the cashier that he had been forced to cancel his credit card when someone was able to obtain his numbers, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The Supreme Court's conservative justices on Wednesday were sharply critical of President Obama's approach to a federal law on same-sex marriage. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder decided in 2011 that the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. They quit defending it in the courts, but directed federal agencies to continue to comply with the law. Conservatives on the Supreme Court criticized that approach Wednesday during oral arguments over whether DOMA is constitutional. “I don't see why he doesn't have the courage of his convictions,” Chief Justice John Roberts said of Obama's decision to continue following the law, even...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I'm just waiting for the printer to spit something out here. It's about the chief justice. Here's the headline: "Chief Justice John Roberts Compares Gay Marriage To Forcing A Child To Call Someone 'A Friend.'" They have released the audio of the oral arguments now, and this is the story from Mediaite. "The optimism that Jean Podrasky, cousin of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, displayed when she told The Los Angeles Times that she 'trust(s) he will go in a good direction' in deciding whether same-sex couples have the right to marry may have been misplaced....

(CNSNews.com) – Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts’ cousin, a lesbian seeking to get married in California who will have reserved seating for relatives at two upcoming cases, wrote that she believes her cousin will rule in favor of same-sex marriage in an op-ed posted on the National Council for Lesbian Rights. A spokesperson for the court did not respond to questions about a potential conflict for Roberts. “I know that my cousin is a good man,” Jean Podrasky, 48, of San Francisco wrote. “I feel confident that John is wise enough to see that society is becoming more...

Why are liberal activists exerting themselves so fervently to attack the points made by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia last week during the oral arguments in the Shelby County v. Holder case? Perhaps the justices’ critics are desperate to retain the unconstitutional preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which have given the Obama administration political and legal leverage in redistricting and other election-law challenges. The chief justice provided some reason last June, in his decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, to believe that such attacks might cause him to change his mind. But the recent attacks are...

One of the necessary features of any law is enforcement. Taxes are laws, and if you don't pay your taxes, the government swoops down on you like a raptor on a rodent. You then must either pay up or prove that you don't owe the money the government says you owe. Otherwise, government can garnish your wages, take your house, or maybe even put you in prison. None of that applies to the "tax" that Chief Justice John Roberts "discovered" in the Affordable Care Act, which the legislation had mistakenly labeled a "penalty" for noncompliance with the mandate to buy...

Many of us have questioned what caused Roberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as reported by CBS, and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question. In 2000 Justice Roberts and his wife Jane adopted two children. Initially it was apparent that the adoptions were "from a Latin American country", but over time it has become apparent that the adopted children were not Latin American, but were Irish. Why this matters will become evident. In 2005 the NY...

Many of us have questioned what causedRoberts to switch his vote on ObamaCare at the last minute, as repo..., and doing so, so late that the Conservative Justices were forced to rewrite their majority opinion to be minority dissent. These facts may answer that question.

In new, final regulations issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said that parents must pay a federal fine under Obamacare if their children or dependent spouses are uninsured for any part of the year. The regulations clarify provisions of Obamacare that seem to say that a parent will be held liable for Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty if they don’t have insurance coverage for their children. In its final regulations, the IRS states that parents will be made to pay the penalty if they can claim an uninsured child or spouse as a dependent, regardless of whether they actually claim...

A news release from Attorney Orly Taitz reveals Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has distributed for a February 15th conference of the Court, Taitz’s Obama eligibility challenge of Noonan et al v Bowen. (5) The conference of the Court is intended to decide the merits of Ms. Taitz’s challenge to Obama’s eligibility to hold the office of President. The filed action will present evidence of the following: 1. Barack Obama used a last name not legally his 2. Obama permitted the use of a forged Selective Service application 3. Obama permitted the use of forged long form and short...

Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday called on the White House and Congress to provide sufficient funding and enough judges to ensure that the federal judiciary can do its job well despite the fiscal problems the country faces. In his annual report on the federal judiciary, Roberts recognized the battle in Washington over the “fiscal cliff,” saying the country has a fiscal ledger that has “gone awry” and must address the longer-term problem of a “truly extravagant and burgeoning national debt.” He said the judiciary has been doing its part to cut costs aggressively, but can only go so far...

'People deserve better than this. And that's the bottom line' He single-handedly delivered the swing vote to approve Obamacare and perhaps even crushed the American health system that has been the envy of the world. WND has selected U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. for its first-ever Benedict Arnold Award. “There are lots of bad guys out there who would qualify as ‘Villain of the Year,’ but precious few candidates for the ‘Benedict Arnold Award,’” explained WND Vice President and Managing Editor David Kupelian. “Benedict Arnold, after all, was a good guy; he was an American general in...

Even though Obamacare was decided months ago, pundits are still dissecting the court's actions. CNN's top legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and famed lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz sat down on Friday at New York's 92nd Street Y to debate why Chief Justice John Roberts used his deciding vote to pass President Barack Obama's controversial health care law. And, according to Dershowitz, Roberts did it just so he could side with Republicans from now on without getting called out for being too conservative. "Roberts is very political," Dershowitz said in the interview, posted by Above The Law. "And what he did...

On the day Barack Obama signed his ObamaCare bill into law, Matthew Staver, the Founder and Dean of the Liberty University School of Law filed one of the first private lawsuits against the new Act, claiming ObamaCare mandated the forced, direct funding of abortion, a clearly unconstitutional violation of the free exercise of religion. Though the University’s lawsuit has been held up by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals which argued that the Anti-Injunction Act prevented the court hearing the merits of the case, that barrier was torn down by the June Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare. As a result,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — When last we saw the chief justice of the United States on the bench, John Roberts was joining with the Supreme Court’s liberals in an unlikely lineup that upheld President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Jeffrey Toobin's latest book portrays Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as increasingly cranky and partisan — and infuriated with Chief Justice John Roberts over the court's recent decisions on healthcare and immigration. Toobin, who writes for The New Yorker and also covers the court for CNN, credits Scalia for a sea change in how both sides of the political spectrum think about the law. But he says the justice's bombast has become off-putting to more even-tempered colleagues.

NPR’s Terry Gross brought on CNN judicial analyst Jeffrey Toobin on Monday to discuss his new book on the Supreme Court (called The Oath) for 44 minutes of her program Fresh Air. Toobin proclaimed that Barack Obama is the conservative when it comes to the Supreme Court, and John Roberts is the radical revolutionary. This is the same Toobin who complained overturning ObamaCare would be "judicial activism." Toobin also claimed with a straight face (or at least an ungiggly voice) that Roberts voted to uphold ObamaCare to pave the way for more conservative decisions, to insulate the court from being...

McDonald's restaurants across the country will soon get a new menu addition: The number of calories in the chain's burgers and fries. The world's biggest hamburger chain said Wednesday that it will post calorie information on restaurant and drive-thru menus nationwide starting Monday. The move comes ahead of a regulation that could require major chains to post the information as early as next year. "We want to voluntarily do this," said Jan Fields, president of McDonald's USA. "We believe it will help educate customers." In cities such as New York and Philadelphia where posting calorie information is already required, however,...

For those of us who enjoy debating with leftists over the merits of ObamaCare, the most maddening argument to encounter is, “Why are you even arguing with me!? ObamaCare is a CONSERVATIVE law! The only reason you don’t like it is because President Obama proposed it, right? I bet if Bush signed it into law, you would LOVE it!” Obviously, this frustrating argument is grounded in the myth that ObamaCare is actually a conservative law. As I argued in part one of this series, liberals are wrongfully asserting that all conservatives are Republicans, and that all Republicans are conservatives, and...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans' opinions of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts are now much more negative than they were seven years ago, with the most recent reading coming soon after he joined the four Democratic appointees on the court to uphold the U.S. healthcare law. Republicans' favorable rating of Roberts is down 40 percentage points from 2005, while Democrats' is up 19. Gallup did not measure Americans' opinions of Roberts between September 2005 and the most recent survey, conducted July 9-12. It is a reasonable assumption, however, that a good deal of the shift in attitudes occurred as...

President Barack Obama signed his executive order stopping deportation of some young illegal immigrants who entered the United States as children a scant 13 days before Justice John Roberts flipped his no to a yes allowing the President’s premier legislation to become the law of the land just as Obama’s reelection campaign ramps up. Now some observers are wondering if questions asked about the Roberts’ private adoptions in 2005 during his confirmation hearings might have had a “lingering” effect. According to underneaththeirrobes.blog.com, “Perhaps the children were born in Ireland but were in Latin America immediately prior to their adoption.” The...

Supporters of the Obama health law are incorrectly reading the Supreme Court’s ruling as a victory. First, the ruling severely limited the Obama health law’s Medicaid expansion, effectively giving states the green light to refuse to expand their Medicaid programs. Coupled with the fact that the statute already enables states to block the other half-trillion dollars of new entitlement spending, the law is in a very precarious position. Second, the Court ruled 5-4 that the individual mandate is not a legitimate use of the Commerce Power. That too is a defeat for the government, even if it is of no...

Chief Justice John Roberts says in his opinion that the Interstate Commerce clause doesn't authorize the mandatory health insurance provision of Obamacare but that following the Constitution isn't important so long as the Chief Justice is in political agreement with what Congress wants a law to do. Chief Justice Roberts has apparently forgotten that the Supreme Court's only authority to act is as a legal body. It is not a super house of Congress with the authority to correct what individual justices believe are errors in acts of Congress. The Court is supposed to base its actions on the Constitution...

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Nev.) said Monday he “still has a very high opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts," despite Roberts opinion upholding the individual mandate in Obamacare as constitutional. Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had been one of the earliest and most forceful voices in the Senate speaking out against the constitutionality of the individual mandate when it was first proposed in 2009. On Monday, however, Hatch told CNSNews.com that Roberts “certainly had the right” to rule that the mandate is constitutional as a tax. “Naturally, I...

Though few Americans are aware of it, the unconscionable ObamaCare ruling of Chief Justice John Roberts stands to provide Barack Hussein Obama unlimited and fundamentally irrevocable power less than 2 years after the November election. For should he win, Obama will acquire the “legal” authority to select 15 individuals whose word will automatically become the law of the land. Within the 2500 pages of the comically-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is cached the 2014 establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Nominated exclusively by the president, the 15 members of the Board will ostensibly be tasked with “…prevent[ing]...

The commercial starts with diver David Boudia climbing up the Burj Dubai, and jumping off, with his reflection shown as the way the 9/11 jumpers were, and then he hits the water, and others were following him in their dives, only that they lived and the crowd celebrates.

WASHINGTON DC - Jubilant scientists at the DNC's High Speed Word Collider (HSWC) announced today they have conclusively disproven the existence of Roberts' Taxon, the theoretical radioactive Facton particle that some had worried would lead to the implosion of the entire Universal Health Care System. Continued

“A republic, if you can keep it.” Ben Franklin Masked by chatter around judicial wrangling, electoral ramifications and how the surprising Obamacare decision impacts policy, many miss the wretched significance of Chief Justice Roberts’ twisted logic. He has empowered runaway government certain to incite chaos. The Affordable Care Act reflects the logical continuation of a decades-long drift toward domineering by Washington over every facet of life. Not logical as in likely to succeed. Few government initiatives do. But logical because rather than scuttle past failures, subsequent congresses spawn new efforts to offset what prior funding merely squandered. Taxpayers already footed...

Rush is driving me crazing.

Are We Being Too Hard On John Roberts? OpinionJuly 5th, 2012 Ken Connor   “Members of this court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments.  Those decisions are entrusted to our nation’s leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them.  It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” -Chief Justice John Roberts in NFIB vs. Sebelius  Conservatives are apoplectic that John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, sided with the liberal wing...

As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. These justices hold dear what the great Chief Justice John Marshall called “the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected”: a written Constitution, with real and determinate meaning. The judges that Mitt nominates will exhibit a genuine appreciation for the text, structure, and history of our Constitution and interpret the Constitution and the laws as they are written. And his nominees will possess a demonstrated record of adherence to these core principles.

I've been a little surprised by the continued outrage on the right and chest-thumping on the left regarding the Supreme Court's health care decision. The right got everything it wanted in the ruling, save for the actual outcome. The left got legal reasoning that, up until the minute the decision was handed down, it had maintained would mark the end of government as we know it. Sad to say, but the main takeaway is that most court-watchers, left and right, care a lot about the outcome and very little about the law. Some on the right are latching onto one...

What if new parents were required to show proof of life insurance prior to taking their newborns home from the hospital (just like they have to have a car seat). Should parents have to show proof of “financial responsibility”?

Mulling over the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Obamacare this weekend, it occurred to me why this remains a BFD. It's not that we now have a reprieve for the idea of universal healthcare in the US. Or even that we have an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that could eventually mean some non-trivial ratcheting back of the federal government's powers vis-a-vis the states. It is that a creature of the conservative movement, one of its youngest and most intelligent stars, saw the radicalism of the four dissenters ... and balked. He balked, it appears, because of his attachment...

Caroline Horn�@CNHorn On @CBSEveningNews, @cbsjancrawford says Romney told her Roberts' opinion seemed political, not based on Constitution.

Amid John Roberts' craven surrender to "the political branches" on Obamacare -- a bizarre capitulation, at that, since Roberts honored a statute that he hallucinated, but neither Congress nor the president authored nor authorized -- Americans should remember just how many rules, standards, and traditions had to be twisted or bulldozed in order for the [un]Affordable Care Act to become law. For Obamacare to be enacted in the first place required each of more than a dozen, highly unlikely or even suspect, occurrences or actions. It then took some serious constitutional hocus pocus for it to survive in court. Consider...

This is getting ridiculous. John Roberts appears to be a one man constitutional wrecking crew. According to Salon: "This weekend CBS News' Jan Crawford reported that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote in regard to upholding the bulk of the Affordable Care Act. Crawford reports that Roberts voted with the rest of the court's conservatives to strike down the individual mandate, but in the course of drafting his opinion changed his mind, and ended up siding with the court's four liberals to uphold almost all of the law. In response, according to Crawford's story, the four conservatives then independently...

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the individual mandate is in fact a tax, the next question is: Who will it hit and by how much?According to the Congressional Budget Office, of the 3.9 million people who will pay the new Obamacare tax, 3 million are middle-class individuals and families making less than 500 percent of the federal poverty level. They will collectively pay $1.9 billion in new taxes under Obamcare.In other words, the president who swore he would not raise taxes on the middle class has hit 3 million middle class Americans with a nearly $2...

IRS officials on background tell FOX Business the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on health reform gives the IRS even more powers than previously understood. The IRS now gets to know about a small business's entire payroll, the level of their insurance coverage -- and it gets to know the income of not just the primary breadwinner in your house, but your entire family’s income, in order to assess/collect the mandated tax. Plus, it gets to share your personal info with all sorts of government agencies, insurance companies and employers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. "We expect even...

I wondered about this on the afternoon of the decision. It stands to reason: If, as most everyone believes, Roberts initially assigned the majority opinion to himself and then ended up flipping at the eleventh hour, the four conservative dissenters would have had to scramble to come up with an opinion of their own while handling the rest of their caseload. (Roberts authored no other opinions over the final two months of the term so he and his clerks could conceivably have drafted something new from scratch late in the process.) The easiest way to do that would be to...

In the video clip below, Katherine Albrecht, author of the book "Spy Chips" explains how microchips work, and how RFID tracking is used in all kinds of products, and then explains how embedded microchips work in the body. Watch carefully near the end of the clip, when Joe Biden, a Senator at the time asks Justice John Roberts at a Confirmation Hearing: "Can a miniature tag be implanted into a human body to track his every movement? You will rule on that, mark my words, before your tenure is over." This statement by Biden clearly exposes the heart of the...

6/28/2012, the day Federalism died. It is also the day that exposed the true nature of centralized Statist power, how one man could change not only the fundamental nature of the relationship between the people and the government, but how this one man did so after first siding with the Constitution and then changing his mind in order to protect the image of the Supreme Court. Yes, you heard that correctly; Chief Justice Roberts, whose job as a justice of the highest court in the land is to rule on the Constitutionality of a law, ruled instead on the basis...

Simple enough question. We need to start using this option. He clearly brought the country closer to tyranny, and that in my view is an impeachable offense. Outside of "my view", his job is to uphold the constitution. He failed to do his job. He failed to protect the people. He failed to protect COTUS. He should be fired.

Chief Justice John Roberts has handed a remarkable victory to American conservatives by threading the judicial needle with perfect precision. The initial disappointment collectively felt by Americans who had hoped for a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Obamacare soon will be replaced, upon further reflection, by the excitement that will come with a fuller appreciation of what the Chief Justice has wrought. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/the_chief_justice_done_good.html#ixzz1zVtA34HQ

Amazing what happens while your internet connection gets wiped out, isn't it. Today's breaking news is that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts originally voted to strike down the mandate in Obamacare, but then changed his mind and sided with the liberal members of the court. Or so CBS reports. 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...

Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington — too often, Republicans — who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness. President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for...

(or some other form of direct payments, how about a TIME[or other magazine] subscription?) We got screwed by John Roberts and the SCOTUS on Obamacare. But not really. Roberts capitulated because he feared what the journalist chattering class would print about him. Page 2 of the story If you want to save America, defeating the media is job #1.

It's come out how Chief Justice Roberts totally capitulated to the Mainstream Media. While it may be said that the SCOTUS raised your taxes in affirming this ruling, now that we know what went on behind the scenes it's clear that the media is who raised your taxes. Roberts Switched Views to Uphold Health Care Law (Because of fear from what the media would report) Have you canceled your newspaper subscription yet? If you truely want to save the country, defeating the media is more important than even winning elections. This supreme court ruling proves it without a shadow of...

The liberal lionization of John Roberts is roaring through the media. He is, after all, the man who saved Obamacare for a president who opposed his confirmation. One moment he is the bête noire of the left, a right-wing legal hack who lied about being a neutral umpire, and the next he is a profile in courage, rising above petty partisanship to do the right thing. Is this a classic case of what many on the right carp about—that conservatives are depicted as having “grown” and “evolved” only when they move to the left? In some ways, sure. But the...