Uh huh... and which camp do you place John Roberts in?
On reflection of his decision, he is a strategist.
Justice Kennedy has a bad habit of voting with the conservatives only when it doesn’t matter. When it is liberal agenda stuff, like Obamacare, he votes with the left. But importantly, *only* when he is the deciding vote.
That is, had Roberts voted against Obamacare, Kennedy would have voted to approve it in its entirety, and that would have given the left a majority. And his snatching Kennedy’s deciding vote allegedly enraged Kennedy, who wanted to go into the books as the justice who approved socialized medicine.
However, one of the few unique powers the Chief Justice has that other justices do not, is when they vote with the majority, they can *choose* who will write the majority opinion.
In this case, he voted with the majority, but then assigned the majority opinion composition to *himself*. This meant that he, within some limits, could sabotage Obamacare from within. And he did so in two ways.
And he did so far beyond Obamacare, even creating an opportunity to sabotage both New Deal laws like Social Security, *and* LBJ’s Great Society laws that created the welfare state.
The unconstitutional New Deal laws were justified with the Interstate Commerce clause in the constitution; and the Great Society laws were justified with the General Welfare clause. And Roberts successfully undermined both of these.
In brief, he said that while the feds might mandate some law that the states must obey, they can only do so if *they* pay for it. They cannot compel states to grow such programs with state money.
The immediate result of this is a bunch of the states now refusing to enlarge Medicaid, as Obama had demanded. But it may eventually imperil many other overreaching federal programs as well.
Big conservative victory there.
The other thing the Roberts decision did was to kill the individual mandate. He did this by saying that the federal government cannot order citizens to buy insurance as such; but they *can* *tax* citizens to that effect.
And this was crafty, because constitutionally, taxation comes under some very strict rules, and congress has great flexibility to both *make* and *break* taxes. So now to kill a big chunk of Obamacare, instead of needing 2/3rds majorities in both houses of congress, only 51% of each house is needed.
Which almost guarantees that Obamacare will be destroyed sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately for Roberts, very few people grasp the finesse with which he did this. But he in effect played the left wing of the court, and created a whole lot of opportunity in the future to set back the progressive agenda by the better part of a century.