On "Fox News Sunday" Charles Lane noted that he has been following John Roberts since he was practicing as a lawyer and his sense is that Roberts is playing chess while the other Justices are playing checkers.
Maybe Machiavelli is in play.
Charles Lane: John Roberts’s Compromise of 2012 - The Washington Post
By , June 29, 2012
The Supreme Court’s health-care ruling is welcome because it is a compromise. The justices overcame their differences, defusing political conflict and channeling it into the election where it belongs.
But the ruling is historic because it is a Compromise — a crisis-averting pact across lines of ideology, party and region, the likes of which we have not seen since pre-Civil War days.
Four of the court’s five Republican-appointed conservatives wanted to strike down the Democratic Party’s most cherished legislative achievement since the Great Society, dealing an election-year political blow to President Obama.
Their legal arguments were hardly specious, but they were novel enough to be plausibly branded partisan and opportunistic — possibly in a dissenting opinion by four liberal Democratic appointees on the court that would have become a de facto Obama campaign manifesto.
For Chief Justice John Roberts, the temptation to join the other four GOP appointees, consequences be damned, must have been strong. Surely this lifelong conservative has little use for “Obamacare.”
Yet he is also a student of history, especially pre-Civil War America; his intellectual biography of Daniel Webster won Harvard’s undergraduate writing prize in 1976. If anyone sees a parallel between today’s polarized politics and those of Webster’s time, it would be Roberts. No one understands the United States’ constitutional strengths, and vulnerabilities, better than he.
Roberts grasped two realities. First: In a great national debate, no side has a monopoly on wisdom. Second: Conservatism has no future if the country slides into division and dysfunction.
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