Chief Justice John Roberts continues to be a disappointment to conservatives who supported his confirmation during George W. Bush’s years as president. The big revelation that he wasn’t your father’s conservative was the inscrutable logic Roberts used to save Obamacare by labeling the mandate penalty a “tax,” when president Obama himself called it a “penalty.”
Roberts then punted when asked to give an opinion on the wisdom of surrendering one-sixth of the U.S. economy to government oversight by saying, “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Wut?! Actually, as the senior-most member of one of the three branches of government which exist as a system of checks and balances to preserve our liberties, it is your job.
This is the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court?
Roberts then struck again twice this week, in the first instance siding with newly revealed liberal Justice Neil Gorsuch and the other four known liberal jurists on redefining the meaning of “sex” as written in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to extend protections to gay, lesbian and transgender workers.. Where one stands on LGBTQ+ issues is irrelevant; Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bostock legislates rather than interprets.
If Roberts is still looking for something that’s “not our job,” that would be it.
Then, Thursday, Roberts wrote the majority opinion “joined by the court’s four more liberal members in upholding the executive action by President Barack Obama that established the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.”
Roberts swore the decision was not a judgment on whether DACA is permissible, but only judged the process. “‘We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,’ the chief justice wrote. ‘We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.'”
It’s like a school teacher handing back a paper that reaches the right conclusion, but telling the student to go back and do it again based on a technicality.
Indeed. Why is it so hard to find authentic conservative jurists?