Roberts Hands a Poisoned Chalice to the President

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American Thinker:

 

 

July 2, 2012

Roberts Hands a Poisoned Chalice to the President

 

By Christopher Chantrill

What in the world was Chief Justice Roberts trying to do by voting with the liberals on ObamaCare? Conservative opinion is all over the map, but conservative talk show hosts were clear, as I drove south from liberal Seattle to liberal Ashland, Oregon, on June 28, 2012, that the ball was in the voters' court.

Whatever you think of Roberts' decision, his message was unequivocal. If you don't like ObamaCare then you'd better vote it down in November. In this he gives conservatives real clarity.

If the Supreme Court conservatives had voted down ObamaCare by a vote of 5 to 4 the liberals would not have accepted it, any more than the pro-life movement accepts Roe v. Wade. There was only one way in 2012 to make a Supreme Court decision to invalidate ObamaCare stick, and that would have been for Justice Kagan to join the conservative majority in a 6-3 decision. Why Kagan? Look at the other three liberals: Ginsburg was a liberal ACLU lawyer; Breyer was a Kennedy staffer; Sotomayor an affirmative action pick -- liberal hacks every one. But Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General; she is the liberal educated elite. Her vote to overturn would have been an admission from the educated establishment that ObamaCare was unjust and wrong.

Good luck with that. So the only way to make liberals accept a repeal of ObamaCare is by the brute force of political power, the mandate of the voters expressed at the ballot box, just as Chief Justice wrote in the majority decision.

Chief Justice Roberts did his level best "nudge" the voters. First of all, he ruled that ObamaCare is constitutional because it is really a tax. This means that Mitt Romney and a dozen SuperPACs can tell the voters that President Obama has raised taxes on the middle class. Secondly, Roberts ruled that the federal government cannot penalize states that don't accept expanded Medicaid.

These two poison pills hand the president a poisoned chalice.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/roberts_hands_a_poisoned_chalice_to_the_president.html#ixzz1zUMMIPOw