Authored by J.B. Shurk viaAmerican Thinker,
He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line.
I do not like Chief Justice John Roberts.I think his loyalties lie more with defending the entrenched powers of the political Establishment than with defending the Constitution of the United States.I find his jurisprudence squishy. Although his decisions could be described as advancing, more often than not, conservative viewpoints, Roberts does not seem to have a consistent philosophy guiding his opinions.
Roberts is a pragmatist.He surveys the mood of the country and considers how the rest of the members of the Court will vote on any case, and he chooses a position that he feels will best preserve the institutional longevity of the Judicial Branch. Roberts is, in other words, more interested in maintaining the power of the branch that he embodies than in making tough, but correct, decisions.
None of Roberts’ rulings better exemplifies this pragmatic, amoral approach to jurisprudence than his 2012 decision tosave Obamacareby redefining the individual insurance mandate as a tax, rather than as a penalty.During oral arguments, the Obama administration barely addressed the possibility that the mandate could be seen as a tax. Democrats did not want to admit that nationalizing health insurance would increase costs for Americans, and the word “tax” certainly implies that prices will rise (which they did).
President Obama had been haranguing the Court for over a year that should it strike down his signature welfare legislation putting the federal government in control of American medicine, the decision would be disastrous for the American people and render the Court illegitimate. Roberts lives in the D.C. bubble. All his friends live in the D.C. bubble. The Democrat-controlled corporate news media reflect the prevailing opinions of those who live within the D.C. bubble. So Chief Justice Roberts chose to avoid leftist backlash (and to protect the Establishment’s sizable financial investments in government-controlled, socialized medicine) by aligning himself with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
Obama celebrated Roberts’ valuable assist: “The highest court in the land has now spoken,” the presidentgloated. It is worth noting that similarly squishy jurist Justice Anthony Kennedy (a man whom Democrats succeeded in elevating to the Court after scuttling President Reagan’s original nomination of Robert Bork and then his replacement nomination of Douglas Ginsburg) actually joined the conservative members of the Court in a dissent that would have invalidated Obamacare in its entirety. Because Roberts joined the four leftist members of the Court in protecting Obama’s government takeover of the medical profession, healthcare is substantially more expensive and provides substantially worse treatment today.
Roberts’ constitutionally illiterate and philosophically unsound Obamacare opinion permitted a nefarious government-corporate power axis to take hold that has killed private practices across the country, made every medical doctor ade factogovernment employee, replaced medical science with government-regulated treatments, and inserted a government bureaucrat inside every examination room.But Roberts did preserve his standing in the D.C. bubble, maximize the profits of large insurance companies, bankrupt rural hospitals, increase the investment portfolio-generated wealth of insider-trading members of Congress, eliminate small practices that prioritized patient care, and let labor unions off the hook for healthcare obligations that they owed to their members. Furthermore, an entire generation of young leftists — too ignorant to know that President Obama and his fellow Democrats are responsible for the horrible state of healthcare in the United States today — openlycelebratethe assassination of health insurance company executives walking down the street.
When the issue of Obamacare’s unconstitutionality came before the Roberts Court, the chief justice could have saved the country from all the harm that has come from forcing another illegitimate government power grab upon the American people. But that would have taken guts, wisdom, and principle. Roberts has none of those virtues. He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line. The medical profession in America is worse off and American patients are poorer and less healthy because of Roberts’ cowardice.
What I find particularly galling about the chief justice, however, is that he demands to be respected as some kind of impartial and inherently righteous judicial priest.If he could admit that he lacks a jurisprudential backbone and primarily represents the interests of the Establishment Blob in D.C., I would grant him some small measure of respect for being self-aware enough to understand that he is little more than a swampy, Leviathan-controlled, gelatinous judge whose opinions can be molded into whatever D.C.’s “elites” need. But Roberts is not honest enough to do that. Instead, he pretends to be above venal politics and struts around in his priestly robes as if he represents a branch of government too holy to be tainted by the inherently corrupting influence of power.
Source: ZeroHedge News
