El Rushbo did loosen up a little today when he said that he was warned long ago by a good source that he shouldn't consider Justice Kennedy as being the future weak leak on the Supremes, but to keep an alert eye on the so-called conservative Roberts.
Rush thinks Roberts is trying to carve out a "legacy" for himself....i.e., people think of the "Warren Court" and the "Rehnquist Court"....and he'd like to leave a "Roberts Court" to history.
Rush may be correct on this, although I think there's something more to it than that rather simplistic analysis. I think Rush would privately agree with my take, also.
Leni
I just read the article at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/28/Did-Roberts-Give-in-to-Obama-Bullying . It says that the dissenting opinion refers to a DIFFERENT opinion as the dissenting opinion and uses the term “we”, which is typically used for the majority opinion. This suggests that Kennedy’s opinion was supposed to be the majority opinion.
The article suggests that Roberts changed his vote at the last minute - they suggest because of the media “bullying” here toward the end. They talk about the thin reasoning, which is not characteristic of Roberts - as if he had no time to come up with excuses for his decision. There is also a video at the bottom of that link; I can’t see the video but it claims that Justice Kennedy was visibly angry about the decision.
Somebody had mentioned also that the opinions are read in order of the seniority of the justice who wrote the majority opinion. I don’t know exactly how the reading of the decisions went today, but I wonder if Obamacare being last would reflect a majority opinion written by Kennedy rather than by Roberts. Were the decisions in order so that the last decision was read by the most senior (that is, longest-standing) justice? Did Kagan or Sotomayor write the majority opinion for Stolen Valor? If not, then somebody more senior than Roberts read before he did, which is out of order.