‘Obamacare’: Lobbying the Supreme Court

John Roberts’s reputation is on the line, said Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic. The chief justice and his fellow Supreme Court justices will soon issue a ruling on the constitutionality of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Roberts promised to serve as an impartial “umpire,” calling balls and strikes; after his first year on the bench, he said that a continued string of 5–4 decisions along partisan lines would undermine the “rule of law” itself. But if Roberts now joins the majority of justices to strike down a health-care reform law passed by Congress, as fellow conservatives demand, his goal of “presiding over a less divisive court will be viewed as an irredeemable failure.” Emboldened conservative activists would then launch constitutional challenges to a host of post–New Deal legislation, including workplace and food regulations and most environmental laws. Does Roberts really want to be remembered as the chief justice who took America back to the 1920s?

Let me put Rosen’s argument into simpler language, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. “Vote our way, Justice Roberts,” and you’ll be “brilliant and nonpartisan.” Overturn Obama-care, and we liberals will do our best to ruin your reputation. Clearly, Obama’s surrogates are making a concerted attempt to intimidate the justices: Pat Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, recently warned the court against making judgments based on their own “personal views” and overturning laws approved by “the people’s elected representatives.” Liberals can hector and threaten the chief justice all they want, said George Will, also in the Post. But their blatant attempts to bend Roberts “are apt to reveal his spine of steel.”

“Poor Justice Roberts,” said Nan Aron in HuffingtonPost.com. How awful it must be for him to hear people like Rosen and Leahy point out that after blatantly partisan decisions like Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, polls “show a weakening of respect for the Supreme Court and a growing perception that politics intrudes in its decisions.” Roberts is a big boy and can handle a little heat, said Michael McGough in the Los Angeles Times. As “a life-tenured judge,” he probably has decades of court rulings ahead of him. To suit his own agenda, he might “seek a bipartisan consensus in the health-care case,” and he might not. “But the idea he can be intimidated is bonkers. So is the idea that commentators can’t advise him on how to vote.”

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