On the other hand, Justice Roberts may have felt that the Court should give deference, whenever possible, to acts of Congress, so as to not over politicize the role of the Court. In other words, he may feel that it is up to the legislative branch to set policy, no matter how foolish, and the Court should intervene only when it is absolutely necessary to protect the constitution. As Roberts stated in his opinion: "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 elected 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." Since the commerce clause has been given such wide deference in the past, including the outlawing of what would seem purely state matters such as the intrastate sale of wheat or marijuana, he may well have felt that to ignore that tradition of deference would have signaled that now the court is in fact a political force. The more the court is politicized, the less its judgment is respected by the public at large. This is an important consideration and one that a chief justice has to take quite seriously.
“...he may well have felt that to ignore that tradition of deference would have signaled that now the court is in fact a political force.”
Abandon Reason and Sense to prove the unprovable? Good plan.
Chief Justice Roberts, if it is not the Supreme Court’s job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices by ruling on the Constitutionality of laws passed what is the job?
It seems to me that the job is to protect the Republic.
Not sure if you noticed, but the opinion polls before and after the SCOTUS decision was announced suggest that the Chief Justice was too clever by half. The public thinks that the Court stinks, and is even more partisan than ever. And the public is right.
When one close Senate election (Al Franken), when one war (Iraq), when one member of the SCOTUS, can have this big an impact on 3% of the World’s economy, somethIng is rotten in Denmark.
That doesn’t explain his red eyes and visibly unhappy demeanor when reading the decision. It also doesn’t explain his own acknowledgement that the taxation angle is just an excuse - a way that it is POSSIBLE to claim that Obamacare is Constitutional. It doesn’t explain why he was not able to adequately explain his change in position to the conservative justices. It doesn’t explain why he wrote the entire decision AND 3/4ths of the dissent. The logic he used defies logic. None of those things support the idea that he really believed what he wrote.
And I cannot believe that he would believe that the court was being APOLITICAL and respecting the separation of powers.... by Roberts personally changing what Congress itself expressly called a “penalty” (as opposed to a tax, which was specifically deliberated by Congress, was central to the issue of where the bill had to originate, and directly impacted the CBO’s assessment of whether the bill impacted the budget) into a tax instead. Justice Kennedy rightly slammed Roberts on that and pointed out that the judiciary actually just wrote their own legislation in that decision. There is NO WAY that his decision can be justified on the basis of respecting the separation of powers, since Roberts just TRAMPLED the separation of powers.
Roberts was in the majority in Citizens United and United States v. Alvarez. The latter decision struck down the Stolen Valor Act.
I guess he didn’t like all those 5/4 rulings. Why bother to have a Supreme Court?