Suchergebnisse

From Lancashire to Wonder Street -- The education of John Roberts -- Hearing the call -- "May it please the court" -- The stand out -- The right place -- Blacks, whites, and brown -- Fusion of ideology and politics -- A switch in time -- Roberts and race : "the nation is no longer divided along those lines" -- Control on a divided court -- An open seat in an election year -- Roberts court in the Trump era

At the sprightly age of 57 and less than seven years into his term as chief justice, John Roberts looks like a man whom time has left behind. The reaction among legal conservatives to the Roberts opinion in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (the healthcare case) has been brutal. Many have accused the chief justice of exchanging the black robes of the jurist for the trappings of the politician. The chief justice is said to have "blinked" and "failed [his] most basic responsibility." Noted originalist scholar Mike Rappaport strongly implied that Roberts is "both a knave and a fool." The cataloguing could go on.

Chief Justice John Roberts surprised practically everyone by supplying the swing vote to uphold the constitutionality of the requirement in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA or Obamacare) that Americans buy health insurance. The reasoning of his decision is equally surprising. He resorted to semantic gamesmanship and suspect logic to find the law constitutional. The artifice of his opinion confirms that he was driven by a desire to reach a result, however suspect the reasoning, that he thought would protect both the Supreme Court and himself from charges of political partisanship. Roberts's decision is the latest in a series of rule-bending steps that have been taken to enact and then defend PPACA. The Democratic leadership in Congress entered into tawdry deals and employed procedural shortcuts to ram PPACA through in 2010. Obamacare bureaucratizes and politicizes the health care system. It gives the government broad authority to control the health insurance and health care delivery systems. Adapted from the source document.

The Rehnquist Court returned power back to the states in rulings that scholars have clubbed "New Federalism." The appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito invite speculation about the future direction of federalism cases in the Supreme Court. A survey of the Roberts Court's federalism rulings discovers that the ideological pathways of new federalism depend upon Justice Kennedy's swing vote and the effects the new appointments have on shaping voting coalitions in light of the vacancies they have filled. Although there is a reconfigured "States' Rights Five" voting coalition, neither Roberts nor Alito endorses rigid viewpoints about federalism and it remains uncertain if the Court will return to the type of aggressive new federalism which arguably defined the legacy of the Rehnquist Court. Adapted from the source document.

In 2012, Chief Justice Roberts disappointed conservative and libertarian Supreme Court watchers by upholding the Affordable Care Act's mandate that everyone buy health insurance as a direct tax. The Chief Justice wrote an excellent opinion -- one of his best -- on why the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses do not allow Congress to…