The Story So Far by Linda Greenhouse
History may someday settle on one of the competing and contradictory narratives now running rampant within the virtual Beltway to explain the decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to save the Affordable Care Act. Since that day seems far off, here in quick summary are the emerging story lines.
In “a singular act of courage,” Chief Justice Roberts took a bullet for the country, Jeffrey Toobin suggests in a New Yorker article that describes the chief justice’s entering the courtroom on the morning of June 28 with eyes “red-rimmed and downcast.” (Was he suffering from the seasonal allergies that plague everyone else in Washington?) Chief Justice Roberts thus exemplifies the “virtue of compromise in an era of Occupiers, Tea Partiers and litmus-testing special interests,” according to David Von Drehle’s admiring Time magazine cover story.
On the other hand, the chief justice is a cynical manipulator who “wanted to maintain the Supreme Court as a playpen for anti-government sophistry” while avoiding trashing up the court altogether, Timothy Noah claims in The New Republic. Can it be that he is fooling us all because “we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts,” an affection both “silly and undeserved,” as Jeff Shesol maintains on Slate?
Worse yet, the chief justice is a traitorous turncoat and a weakling to boot, unable to withstand liberal “bullying,” the improvident choice by a feckless president for the Supreme Court’s center chair, as James Taranto asserts in The Wall Street Journal under the headline “We Blame George W. Bush.”
I can’t remember a time when ScotusWorld (my name for the community of those who hang on the Supreme Court’s every word, “Scotus” being a widely used acronym for “Supreme Court of the United States”) was so fixated on a single justice’s single vote.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/the-story-so-far/?hp
