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Roberts is a very intelligent man. How could he, all of a sudden, be this stupid?

No idea but people are stupid animals who degrade themselves all the time. Hillary Clinton used to be a Goldwater girl. John Anderson, the Congressman from 1980 who ran to Carter's left started his House career as a staunch conservative. It's the simplest explanation, more believable to me than the CJ of the United States being coerced.

Or maybe we didn't know Johnny Boy as well as we thought. I remember several people saying he could have a moderate streak. One "scholar" I heard insisted he was sure Roberts would never vote to overturn Roe V. Wade.

Blackmail, idiocy and going over to the Dark Side are not the only explanations for Roberts’s opinion. I think that Roberts didn't want to be seen as striking down major legislation capriciously, so he bent over backwards to look for a way—any way—to uphold it without betraying his principles, and he fooled himself into thinking that the penalty for not complying with the mandate was really a tax, and that the mandate was really an incentive. I think that Roberts believes that conservatives can criticize him for getting the case wrong on the facts (is it in fact a “tax”?), but not on the law (were it a tax, would Congress have such authority?), and he may be correct about that (I haven't been able to read all the dissents yet, so I'm withholding judgment for now). I think the opinion is a travesty, but it would have been much worse for us had SCOTUS ruled that the Commerce Clause authorized such a law (which would have violated Roberts’s principles so to rule), since it (i) basically would have granted Congress plenary powers and (ii) would make it almost impossible for Congress to repeal the mandate so long as the Democrats have 41 Senators. By ruling that the penalty is a tax, Congress can repeal it though the budget reconciliation process, which is not subject to a filibuster, and the rest of the provisions would then be repealed through normal legislation that the Democrats would not dare to filibuster so as not to condemn insurance companies to certain bankruptcy.