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SKOTUS and The Chief Kangaroo Chief Kangaroo John Roberts, with his tortured opinion in King v. Burwell, has literally turned the high court into “a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted,” as Merriam-Webster defines “kangaroo court.” Should the high court now be called SKOTUS - Supreme Kangaroos of the United States? In his second major ruling on the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – Roberts has once again seemingly succumbed to White House pressure to uphold the law, given his obvious legal gymnastics in finding a way, any way, to justify the...

Part One: The Opportunity The Political Cudgel--and the Embedded Nail The Supreme Court’s Obamacare-affirming decision--which can be summed up as “Read John Roberts’ lips, it’s a tax”--has put a political cudgel in the hands of Republicans. The cudgel, of course, is taxes. But a huge nail is also embedded in the cudgel: the fundamental deceit of Obamacare. Yet in the week since the Court’s decision, Republicans have yet to demonstrate that they truly grasp the significance of this weapon--or that they can effectively wield it. Why? Some Republicans are worried that the fight over Obamacare distracts from the issue of...

Though few Americans are aware of it, the unconscionable ObamaCare ruling of Chief Justice John Roberts stands to provide Barack Hussein Obama unlimited and fundamentally irrevocable power less than 2 years after the November election. For should he win, Obama will acquire the “legal” authority to select 15 individuals whose word will automatically become the law of the land. Within the 2500 pages of the comically-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is cached the 2014 establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Nominated exclusively by the president, the 15 members of the Board will ostensibly be tasked with “…prevent[ing]...

Texas will not expand Medicaid or establish a health insurance exchange, two major tenets of the federal health reform that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last month, Gov. Rick Perry said in a Monday morning announcement. "I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab," he said in a statement. "Neither a 'state' exchange nor the expansion of Medicaid under this program would result in better 'patient protection' or in more 'affordable care.' They would only make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care." Perry's office sent...

Christie: ‘I’m Really Glad' that Extortion is Still Illegal in U.S., 'Even When Done by the President’ By Patrick Burke July 9, 2012 Subscribe to Patrick Burke's posts (CNSNews.com) - New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie said Monday that he was “glad that the Supreme Court ruled that extortion is still illegal in America” and added, “even when done by the president of the United States.” The former U.S. attorney was referring to the recent Supreme Court decision that the Medicaid provision in the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, was unconstitutional. At a talk at the Brookings Institution in Washington,...

Feeling misled? You certainly should. Congress created a law so complex that it occupies between 2,400 and 2,800 pages depending on who says what, almost all of them unread by the people who voted for it. President Obama and his Democratic colleagues told you many things about the law – most of which were either mischaracterizations or outright lies. What Chief Justice John Roberts did was tell the truth, and now we can move forward. This is all on Chief Justice Roberts. The four liberals who concurred with him don’t believe that the individual mandate is a tax. They firmly...

John Roberts didn’t defer to Congress in the ObamaCare case; he just re-wrote the law... This isn’t judicial minimalism; it’s judicial meddling. There is a good reason why not even most liberal commentators are applauding the actual legal reasoning Chief Justice John Roberts used to avoid striking down the ObamaCare law: The “reasoning” is thinner than unleavened bread, and crumbles to dust not just upon gentle handling, but merely under the weight of a piercing gaze. Let us count the inanities, inconsistencies and constitutional/statutory infirmities of the key section of Roberts’ decision, which ruled that the ObamaCare mandate-and-penalty is a...

...... Just as Justice Owen Roberts' switch was attributed to the political storm of Democrat opposition to the Court's reversal of New Deal legislation, there is a widely cited report....that Chief Justice John Roberts had originally sided with the conservative dissenters in the ObamaCare decision, but changed his vote because of concerns about the political prestige of the Court in the eyes of the media and Washington elites. Owen Roberts destroyed his judicial papers. However..... He acknowledged that the Supreme Court's pro-New Deal decisions "reduce the states to administrative districts rather than coordinate sovereigns" and that his switch reached "a...

Time magazine demonstrated in its last issue that it was so overwhelmingly thrilled with John Roberts upholding ObamaCare that it put Roberts on the cover with the title “Roberts Rules,” touting his “landmark decision.” Inside, the magazine gave the ruling 15-plus pages of coverage. By contrast, the Congress voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for failing to deliver documents on the “Fast & Furious” program drew two dismissive paragraphs – one less paragraph than Time editor Richard Stengel took to boost Roberts as a chip off the old block of “John Marshall, the greatest of all Chief...

Jacob J. Lew, the White House chief of staff, on Sunday defended President Obama‘s health care law but rejected the “tax” label that the Supreme Court, in a ruling that mostly upheld the law last week, used to describe the penalty payment required for those who choose not to buy health insurance. The Supreme Court affirmed the so-called individual mandate to buy health insurance on the ground that it might be “reasonably characterized as a tax.” Since the ruling, Republican leaders have denounced the White House for raising the tax burden on Americans with the law, and they have called...

In 2005 I was asked by the Bush administration to assist Judge John Roberts during the Senate confirmation process for his nomination as chief justice of the United States. Over several pressure-packed days, and throughout the confirmation process, I felt I got to know him fairly well. I found him to be one of the most brilliant, thoughtful, and humorous people I’d ever met. Those qualities don’t always go together. It was clear he was going to be a major right-of-center voice on the Supreme Court for decades to come. So it is with a great deal of personal interest...

Speculation persists over why Chief Justice John Roberts joined liberals to uphold the President Obama's signature health-care reform law, and that could affect the Supreme Court. Unprecedented leaks of behind-the-scenes information at the US Supreme Court are raising questions about whether the threat of political attacks and other potential criticism played a role in the high court’s recent decision to uphold President Obama’s health-care reform law. The most detailed leaks came in a CBS News report over the weekend, suggesting that Chief Justice John Roberts may have switched sides in the high-profile case in part to insulate the court and...

Question for legal tweeps: Obama campaign is now denying that administration SG ever argued that Obamacare mandate is a tax. Looking at oral arguments, SG Verrilli said mandate is 'justifiable under its tax power.' Can't find him saying 'It is a tax'… So therefore: Is Obama hiding behind legal hairsplitting, arguing mandate is constitutional under tax power but is not actually a tax?

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street, If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat,If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet. -- The Beatles in "The Taxman" Of the 17 lawyers who have served as chief justice of the United States, John Marshall -- the fourth chief justice -- has come to be known as the "Great Chief Justice." The folks who have given him that title are the progressives who have largely written the history we are taught in government schools. They revere him because he...

WASHINGTON -- I have a headache. I imagine you do too, if you have been trying to interpret the legalese employed by those legal sages who have pronounced on Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. I would rather read the lyrics of a thousand rap composers than the anfractuous language of one legal sage. Thanks, however, to Professor E. Donald Elliott of the Yale Law School I had a translator at my side, and I shall now hand down my judgment of the Court's decision on Obamacare, which all sensible Americans have abstained from reading in its entirety including B....

Caroline Horn‏@CNHorn On @CBSEveningNews, @cbsjancrawford says Romney told her Roberts' opinion seemed political, not based on Constitution.

The wily House minority leader put everything on the line to pass the president’s health-care bill, remained confident it would survive legal challenge—and was proved right when the Supreme Court largely upheld it. Among her first phone calls were her husband (“Sweetie, we won.”) and Vicki Kennedy, Sen. Ted Kennedy’s widow, telling her, “Now Teddy can rest.” Ted Kennedy had long been the inspiration for health care as a right, not a privilege, calling it “the cause of my life,” and Nancy Pelosi, in her role as the first woman speaker of the House, had made it happen. Rushing to...

One of the most common mistakes made in political reporting is to assume that average voter is following the daily news cycle as closely as we are. He or she isn’t. The latest poll numbers from the Pew Research Center on the Supreme Court’s decision on President Obama’s health-care law are (yet another) affirmation of that fact. Forty-five percent — yes 45 percent! — of respondents in the Pew poll either didn’t know what the court had done in regards the health care law (30 percent) or thought that the court had rejected most of the provisions of the law...

The Obama administration granted more than 1600 waivers over compliance with parts of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruling that the individual mandate is a tax will not affect the waivers, as they dealt with what kind of insurance people have, not whether they have it. The ruling, and the waivers, point us directly to the disaster that awaits the country unless the PPACA is fully repealed. (snip) What happens on January 1, 2014? That's when the state-based exchanges are supposed to be up and running, allowing federally subsidized insurance to supplant the policies getting waivers....

As promised, Romney has folded on ObamaCare too, although had I wagered money on the timing, I would have thought that he would have lasted at least a week. But apparently the revenue curve from stupid, imbecilic suckers giving Romney money in the wake of the SCOTUS decision fell off hard enough that the Romney people felt that it served no more purpose to perpetuate the repeal charade. I hope every single one of you who gave that forked-tongued jackass money feel the full shame and embarrassment of your own gullibility and obtuseness. This slackjawed sentimentalism WILL BE THE DEATH...