Justice John Roberts: Genius or Judas?

U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is now saying there are legitimate indicators that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts changed his decision on Obamacare.

Via Philip Klein (h/t Hot Air) at the Washington Examiner:

What happened?

“I don’t know,” Lee said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t see this coming. I confer with a lot of Supreme Court watchers, liberal and conservative alike and nobody saw this coming, this particular outcome. This is not what I expected, not what I wanted, but it happened.”

I asked Lee about speculation that the joint dissent filed by Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas and Alito – which argued for invalidating all of Obamacare – was originally drafted as the majority opinion. Among other things, the dissent spends much of the time attacking the government’s arguments, as well as a dissent from Ginsburg, and only passingly refers to the actual majority opinion. This has been seen by some as a strong indication that Roberts may have changed his vote.

“I noticed the same thing,” Lee said. “Although I don’t know exactly what happened within the Court, these are the kinds of signals you tend to see when something like that does happen. It made no sense to me that the dissent referred repeatedly to the ‘Ginsburg dissent’ instead of the ‘Ginsburg concurring opinion,’ for example. And it was written like it was expected to be a majority opinion. And although I don’t know exactly what happened there, that is the sort of thing you tend to see when somebody switches their vote.”

Lee went on to say that he believed the Obama administration did attempt to influence Roberts but stopped short of speculating on whether it did. If, in fact, the decision was leaked back to Obama, odds are good that Kagan would have been the most likely to do it.

All that aside, if Roberts was intimidated in any way, he has no business being on the bench and should be impeached (which will not happen). If he was not intimidated, he wrote law from the bench. That's really the bottom line here.

Frankly, I'm tired of reading the illogic of George Will and Charles Krauthammer when it comes to the decision rendered by Roberts when it comes to the Obamacare decision. The Individual Mandate was sold by the administration as something that was absolutely not a tax; it was a penalty. The legislation itself said the same thing.

Yet, we're supposed to buy the argument that Roberts made some grand political calculation and ruled that the law stands but that the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional. How'd he do that? Well, he ruled the Mandate is a tax which, by the way, is the kind of tax that's not permitted by the Constitution. It's certainly not covered under the Sixteenth Amendment (h/t Barrackaid #34).

To those who think Roberts' decision was a stroke of genius... Supreme Court Justices are strictly prohibited from issuing rulings based on political calculations or some grand strategy akin to a chess move no one saw coming that puts the other side in checkmate. Roberts isn't supposed to play chess; he's supposed to uphold the Constitution, devoid of any political calculations whatsoever.

In short, even if the decision was politically calculated, it was a violation of his oath to issue a ruling on those grounds.

I'm afraid Justice Roberts moved the United States one step closer to soft genocide.

That sounds like a stroke of Judas, not genius.

**UPDATE** Well, via NewsBusters, while on Face the Nation, CBS political consultant claimed that she had sources who told her that Roberts changed his mind after initially deciding to rule against Obamacare. It shouldn't be overlooked that the Obama administration did attempt to intimidate Roberts. If anything, if Roberts were truly courageous, any attempts to intimidate him should have been met with even firmer resolve.

If he changed his decision, that's not what happened.