Supreme Court Doesn't Care About the Law or the Constitution. It's a policy making body.

The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare.

The discussion focused on the individual insurance mandate and Congress' power to regulate commerce. Roberts went first, as was the custom, laying out his views. He emphasized that he believed the Constitution's commerce clause never was intended to cover inactivity, such as the refusal to buy insurance.

After the chief, conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas offered their views. Like Roberts, they thought Congress' commerce authority did not cover an individual's decision to forgo -- rather than obtain -- health insurance.

So far so good; what does the Constitution say?

The votes of the liberals were known, too. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fifth in seniority, was the first to cast a vote to uphold the individual mandate. She believed Supreme Court precedent demanded the law be found constitutional. She was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer, who agreed with her.

What court precedent? Let's not kid each other, they like the policy and the constitution was not goint to get in the way..

Roberts did not want the entire law to fall. A pro-business conservative, he understood the importance of the insurance industry to US businesses, and he was genuinely concerned about invalidating an entire law that had been approved through the democratic process to solve the intractable health care problem.

There goes the constitution; the focus became the policy.

Breyer and Kagan had voted in the private March conference to uphold the new Medicaid requirement, and their votes had been unequivocal. But they were pragmatists. If there was a chance that Roberts would cast the critical vote to uphold the central plank of Obamacare -- and negotiations in May were such that they still considered that a shaky proposition -- they were willing to meet him partway. ..

Perhaps Roberts' move was born of a concern for the business of health care. Perhaps he had worries about his own legitimacy and legacy, intertwined with concerns about the legitimacy and legacy of the court. Perhaps his change of heart really arose from a sudden new understanding of congressional taxing power. However the chief would explain it -- and he has not explained it beyond his written opinion -- the case added a new dimension to a man who insisted that he always decided cases based on the law.

Viewed only through a judicial lens, his moves were not consistent, and his legal arguments were not entirely coherent. But he brought people and their different interests together. His moves may have been good for the country at a time of division and a real crisis in health care, even as they engendered, in the years since, anger, confusion and distrust.

The Roberts Court

One of the most common beliefs about the way that John Roberts has voted on ObamaCare is that he's doing so to preserve the Supreme Court from ferocious attacks by the Liberal elite.  Commentators beleive that Roberts caved to political pressure, fearing that opposing Obama and the left would "de-legitimize the Court."

There is no question that the major organs of public opinion would have been hysterical if ObamaCare had been gutted or gay marriage had not put on the same pedestal as abortion on demand.

So Roberts chose to protect the Supreme Court from the wrath of the New York Times and NPR. The Constitution was left to fend for itself.

Love Her or Hate Her, Ann Coulter Warned Us About John Roberts 10 Years Ago

After conservatives took another gut punch from black-robed Obamacare cheerleader Chief Justice John Roberts, many of us were left wondering just what in the heck is wrong with this guy. After all, these Republican appointees to the Supreme Court are supposed to be on our side, right? They can’t all be David Souter.

It turns out that Ann Coulter sniffed another Souter-esque betrayal in the offing ten years ago:

After pretending to consider various women and minorities for the Supreme Court these past few weeks, President Bush decided to disappoint all the groups he had just ginned up and nominate a white male.

So all we know about him for sure is that he can't dance and he probably doesn't know who Jay-Z is. Other than that, he is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada. Oh, yeah ... We also know he's argued cases before the Supreme Court. Big deal; so has Larry Flynt's attorney.

But unfortunately, other than that that, we don't know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever.

Since the announcement, court-watchers have been like the old Kremlinologists from Soviet days looking for clues as to what kind of justice Roberts will be.

-- Will he let us vote?

-- Does he trust democracy? Or will he make all the important decisions for us and call them "constitutional rights"?

-- Does he live in a small, rough-hewn cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and avoid "womenfolk"?

It means absolutely nothing that NARAL and Planned Parenthood attack him: They also attacked Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter.

The only way a Supreme Court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial-birth one.

Read the whole thing.

Ann Coulter is very, very smart ... and fast with a quip which hides the fact that she's wise. We tend to support those who are attacked by Liberals, but as Ann points out, Liberals will attack anyone who has not come out - loudly and strongly - for abortion, gun control and government control of everything. This causes us to fall into the trap of supporting people with personal agendas that have nothing to do with the good of the country and protecting the right of everyone to live the life as they see fit.

On a related note, Roberts came out against the the judicial decree making gay marriage the law of the land. I suspect that this is his attempt to make up with conservatives, giving a throw-away vote to the dissent, knowing his vote was not needed to change the definition of marriage. had his vote been needed one can be sure that he would have switched positions.