Digging Out From The Wreckage of ObamaTax

First, more evidence that Roberts was in fact swayed by political, not legal or constitutional, pressure. You can read the evidence that the dissent was originally the majority opinion at the link; I'll quote the stuff about politics on the Court.

I should note that I think the Supreme Court is a political body (which is not to say that its decisions are primarily motivated by partisanship or political ideology) and that one can expect that the Court’s rulings are affected by outside events. As I noted long ago, the challenge to the individual mandate would have stood no chance if the president and the ACA were riding very high in the polls, as the Court would not have had the political wherewithal to write what would be seen as a radical opinion invalidating a popular law from a popular president. Similarly, the level of heat defenders of the ACA were giving the Court could have persuaded Roberts that discretion was the better part of valor...

[I]t is ironic that while liberal critics were quick to accuse the Court of playing politics by taking seriously the Obamacare challenges, it may turn out that it was only politics that saved the ACA.

What galls me is that a majority of the public wanted this overturned -- but we don't count. What counts is the opinion of the elites Roberts socializes with. They are a decided minority, but continue imposing their political will on the nation as if they were a majority.

And the actual majority? The Little People don't count. They don't have the right schooling, nor the socialization to truly understand how to best manage their affairs.

I was just reading a bit about the making of The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Sergio Leone included a brutal Union prison camp; he noted that there was a lot written about the Confederates' brutal prison camps (like Andersonville) but nothing about the Unions' similar camps. The winners, he noted, don't get written about that way.

Roberts has aligned himself with the elites, who he supposes will be the Winners, and will thus have the final say in the history books about him. And he's probably right that they will have the final say: Conservatives simply do not have much sway at all in some of the most critical institutions in America. And we'll continue paying a high price for that until we change that.

Politics is culture, and culture is politics. Until we claw into a position of near parity in the academic, legal, and media guilds, the liberals will continue to have the power of declaring who are heroes and who are villains.

And weak men like John Roberts will continue kowtowing to their judgments.

posted by Ace at 08:11 AM

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