Kennedy was also, however, one of the crucial swing votes in nullifying Texas’ law against sodomy, IIRC. He goes both ways, to use a bad pun.
I think the Bond decision is significant, however. I cannot recall any decision that hinges so much on the Tenth Amendment. We are so used to seeing SCOTUS decisions that are perversions of the Fourteenth.
Actually Kennedy was going libertarian in his opinion on the Texas sodomy law. That would bode well since Obamacare has touches both states rights and individual rights.
He wrote the opinion of the Court in Lawrence vs. Texas (2003). He didn't worry too much about the Tenth Amendment or stare decisis then. <snort!>
Just another chuckle-headed, swing-like-a-gate DC party-hound, AFAIC. He also let Laurence Tribe lobby him for three and a half hours in a Vienna cafe on the eve of the Court's vote on Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, and voted with the liberals then. He could have helped strike down Roe vs. Wade, and in Lawrence he had Byron White's opinion and Chief Justice Burger's concurring opinion before him, scarcely 17 years old, upholding an identical Georgia law, but wrote his lawbreaking squib de novo, as if Bowers vs. Hardwick had never existed, to please the deviant conspirators and power-gays in Washington.
Slanted/perverted article on Bowers vs. Hardwick in Wiki, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Hardwick#Aftermath.
Lastly, we have this comment of Laurence Tribe's, offered at the time of the Sotomayor nomination, handicapping Kennedy's future votes (he should know, having been a major traducer himself of Kennedy's votes in the past), documenting Kennedy as having been influenced by closet-case Associate Justice Souter:
... issues on which Kennedy will probably vote with Roberts despite Souter’s influence but on which I don’t regard Kennedy as a lost cause for the decade or so that he is likely to remain on the Court. (Emphasis added.)
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Tribe.
(Further note on Tribe: He argued for the sodomites before SCOTUS in the Bowers vs. Hardwick case, in relief of Hardwick's original ACLU lawyer -- the case was an instance of barratry by the ACLU, which was scouting for cases to bring against states' sodomy laws -- and wrote an amicus brief for the ACLU in Lawrence, in which the appellant was represented by Lambda Legal, which had done the same in Texas, bringing Baker vs. Wade to a forum-shopped Carter appointee in 1981 before soliciting Lawrence's test [and offense, imho -- the whole offense, arrest, and court case was a setup charade: the person who called police was arrested, charged, and sentenced in a sidebar proceeding later, basically for temporizing with justice] 20 years later. Tribe continues to serve as a Harvard professor despite being reprimanded by the university for plagiarism in a campus scandal in 2004.)