by contrast, closely divided, 5–4 decisions make it harder for the public to respect the Court as an impartial institution that transcends partisan politics.Unless they're decided in favor of the Progressives.
Posted on 07/01/2012 4:55:52 PM PDT by nerdgirl
Some of the least successful chief justices, Roberts suggested, had faltered because they misunderstood the job, approaching it as law professors rather than as leaders of a collegial Court. Harlan Fiske Stone, a former dean of Columbia Law School, was a case in point. Stone “was a failure as chief, because of his misperception of what a chief justice is supposed to be,” Roberts said, gesturing to the justices’ private conference room through an open door of his office. “It’s his desk out there that is separate from the conference table, and he … sat at his desk, and the others were at the table, and he almost called on them and critiqued their performances. They hated that.” Roberts laughed. “As a result, he was a failure as a chief justice.”
In Roberts’s view, the most successful chief justices help their colleagues speak with one voice. Unanimous, or nearly unanimous, decisions are hard to overturn and contribute to the stability of the law and the continuity of the Court; by contrast, closely divided, 5–4 decisions make it harder for the public to respect the Court as an impartial institution that transcends partisan politics.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
You’re welcome, I think for me this ends my “need to know”, and I’ll just have to settle into my discontent and my desire to HELP CHANGE THE COURSE! In my case, that means throwing a few bucks at Romney (literally a few, lol) - and getting involved in whatever local stuff I can to help promote the defeat of Obamacare. Alaskans are pretty conservative, but we did elect that idiot Begich to the Senate...
Since his appointment every opinion delivered by Roberts has been in support of the Federal Government and the granting of additional power to the feds.
He is, was and will contiue to be a government lawyer, why is everyone surprized?
Maybe we would get more common sense out of the court if they had to live outside the beltway, each six months in a different state.
Wake up, guys! You’re living in Cloud Land.
If this is true, then Roberts doesn’t understand the proper function of procedural acts relative to those of substance.
This is a moral failure as well as an intellectual one.
Seems he came to believe that the political legitimacy of the Court was being called into question. Maybe if he had been sequestered from all news this wouldn’t have happened!
The question is, should the Supreme Court Justice really be gauging things like that, and factoring it into his decision? You can certainly argue NO, but “fair” lawyer types like my husband would argue “why not?”
And keep in mind we are both pretty much libertarians in this house, yet we don’t agree on this.
As an anglo Catholic myself, I had hoped his faith would guide him more.
by contrast, closely divided, 5–4 decisions make it harder for the public to respect the Court as an impartial institution that transcends partisan politics.Unless they're decided in favor of the Progressives.
Roberts is traitor to freedom and the constitution. Bush really F##ked up!
There is no way the government should come between me and my relationship with my Doctor.
He correctly applied existing precedent where it existed. He fudged on the one issue where there was no precedent—and failed to discuss that at all, actually. On that, see below.
Existing precedent is wrong. Very wrong, in several different ways. But most fundamentally and importantly, it's wrong with respect to the original intent of the requirement that indirect taxes must be "uniform."
That requirement was originally intended to make the requirement of the principle of the rule of law that the laws must apply to everyone equally apply very explicitly to indirect taxes. And the dodge now used to get around that—writing different rules into the civil and criminal laws and non-uniform rates or duties into tax laws, so that "the same" law applies different rules to people in different situations—is invalid on its face. Doing that makes the uniformity and "apply equally to all" principles effectively powerless and meaningless.
Roberts didn't say what type of tax Congress had unintentionally passed. What he did say is that it wasn't a direct tax that had to be apportioned among the States. That only leaves two possibilities: excise tax or income tax, since the tax clearly is not an impost or duty.
So pleadings that might work would be the following:
Wow....what a great and insightful article....
Thanks for posting it....
-——Marshall’s example had taught him, Roberts said, that personal trust in the chief justice’s lack of an ideological agenda was very important, and Marshall’s ability to win this kind of trust inspired him. “If I’m sitting there telling people, ‘We should decide the case on this basis,’ and if [other justices] think, ‘That’s just Roberts trying to push some agenda again,’ they’re not likely to listen very often,” he observed. -——
At least now I understand why he threw American under the Obama bus....his personal legacy
Being optimistic, I am beginning to think he was planting a poison pill by declaring it a tax, as many respected talking heads speculate. Brit Hume went so far as to assert he made nobamacare killable now by a simple majority under reconsiliation, which makes it damned important for us to go with Mitt and get both majorities in November.
If he changed his vote, it could have been to get the libs to give him their position on Commerce Clause (no longer could call it a mandate to buy and the unfettered ability of States to Opt Out, in trade for the poison pill word “TAX” in an election year.
In the patriot's view, the most successful chief justices help uphold the integrity of the United States Constitution and limit its interpretation strictly to the original intent of its Framers.
Roberts is, and always has been, too full of himself.
Roberts' maintains that his chief task as chief justice is to heard the cats and then he goes and writes a separate opinion which makes the most consequential Supreme Court decision in 40 years come out 1-4-4.
I'll tell ya, this case just get curiouser and curiouser.
God...I want to BANG my head off the wall reading this stuff. Roberts screwd us, ok, period....for all the reasons everyone has stated over & over again.
How did the Citizens United and Heller decisions grant more power to the feds?
The decision WAS 5-4. If Roberts had ruled the other way it would have still been a 5-4 decision. What are these people smoking?
One story I saw stated that the Obamabots got some info that indicated that Roberts cut some corners when he adopted his children from somewhere in South America. That and other threats was all it took for him to bend over and grab his ankles!
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