[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I keep trying to tell people, that Roberts’ vote for Obamacare was a brilliant strategy to *guarantee* it would be destroyed, a “poison pill”. Here’s the logic.

Justice Kennedy would vote with conservatives only on small stuff, then vote with liberals on the big issues. He wanted to be the “swing vote” to get his name in the law books. He wanted to go out with a bang by being the deciding vote FOR Obamacare.

If Justice Roberts had voted *against* Obamacare, Kennedy would have voted for it. And we would have been stuck with it forever, in the *worst* possible form, because the decision would have been written by the liberals, who would have made it bullet proof.

HOWEVER, by voting *for* Obamacare, Roberts hit a home run.

Not only did he thwart Kennedy, who then bitterly joined the losing side to vote against Obamacare, but more importantly it allowed Roberts, as Chief Justice, to invoke one of his few unique powers as Chief Justice: if he joined with the majority, he could assign who gets to write the decision.

And he chose himself, which is where the poison pill comes in. He did this by defining the mandate as a tax.

In the US constitution, Obamacare was designed to be the kind of law that could *only* be overturned by a 2/3rds majority vote in *both* the house and the senate. Which would make it immortal. But the constitution clearly says that tax law *must* be decided by a “simple majority”, only 51%, in both houses.

So Roberts’ strategy made it so that *any* time the Republicans held the slimmest of majorities in both houses, they could KILL Obamacare.

In short, Roberts *personally* drove a stake through the heart of Obamacare.

So for all the conservatives cursing him, he is a conservative hero. It will take a while for people to learn this, but when he has a fully operational conservative court, the SCOTUS is going to shine like never before.

If President Trump nominates someone as brilliant as Justices Roberts, Thomas, or Gorsuch, we may see the systematic dismantling of more than a hundred years of failed leftism.

[bert]

Possible...... but overly complex

[GonzoII]

Whatever his motives, in the end Obama Care became a tax and not a Constitutional “Right”, and as you say subject to Congress. I don't see anywhere else where Roberts has disappointed Conservatives. So far he is 2A all the way and even was against gay “marriage”. It will be interesting to watch SCOTUS in the future as a conservative branch of the Gov. None of us have ever witnessed it before. Best election ever!

[grey_whiskers]

Concur. I think the logic and wording of the Obama care decision was Robert’s big “FU” to his bkackmailer; and they were simultaneously too shirt-sighted (”I won!”), too stupid, and too confident in Hillary’s ‘inevitable’ ascension, to get it.

[Ann Archy]

I LOVE your take... I PRAY its right!!