Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ Daily Diary Entry Sheds Light On His Decision To Uphold The Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare”
Did Chief Justice John Roberts change his mind about overturning the Affordable Care Act? If so, why did he do so? What arguments or thought processes led to Roberts’ “defection” to the liberal wing of the Supreme Court? Today, we at They Will Say ANYTHING! have received new information gleaned from Chief Justice Roberts’ own pen: a May 12, 2012 entry in his diary. Information that sheds the most light yet on the mystery, a light from an almost unbelievable encounter between the Chief Justice and an ordinary appearing pizza delivery man who, in the end, was all but ordinary. . .
Editor’s note: Recently a number of media outlets have speculated that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts changed his mind about overturning the Affordable Care Act (ACA), pulling an unanticipated switcheroo on his conservative colleagues sometime in the month of May or June. Thereby he ultimately cast the swing vote upholding the ACA’s foundation, the individual mandate, on grounds that hinged upon aspects of congressional taxing power. A sizable majority of legal scholars believed the mandate would be overturned via the commerce clause or congressional spending power. In the end Roberts’ majority opinion did indeed declare that Congress had exceeded its powers to regulate interstate commerce and had additionally misused its spending powers.
So, how did Chief Justice arrive so unexpectedly in the liberal majority, the place thought reserved for Justice Anthony Kennedy? According to sources within the court, Roberts was often harangued by Justice Kennedy to rejoin his conservative brethren, yet some journalists report that all the justices weighed in at times. Frankly, we will likely never know the entire truth; the Supreme Court is long known for secrecy, even though Justices Thomas and Scalia have been noted exceptions to the rule. In any event, finding out the reasons for Roberts’ apparent decision to negate his earliest inclination to invalidate the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is a long-shot. So we are left with tea leaves and searching for needles in haystacks.
Today, though, we have had some luck. . . and from the unlikeliest of sources, Chief Justice Roberts’ own pen. In one of the oddest and most surprising events during the months prior to the decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice Roberts became involved in a pizza delivery dispute at the Supreme Court itself. Unknown to all but his closest colleagues, he keeps a daily diary, and he recorded the strange event in it. This morning, a lightning bolt of journalistic good luck resulted in us at They Will Say ANYTHING!coming into possesion of a number of pages of CJ Roberts’ diary. Thanks to one of our inside sources within the federal judiciary’s physical plant maintenance corps, we can today publish John Roberts’ contemporaneous diary entry on May 12, 2012, the day of his dispute with an as yet
unidentified pizza delivery person over payment for two large pizzas delivered to the Chief Justice’s Supreme Court chambers.
We at They Will Say ANYTHING! seek neither to create controversy nor to increase our already largish readership. We simply desire to add to the historical record of the decision-making process involved in the landmark ACA decision. Thereby, today, exclusively at They Will Say ANYTHING! we reproduce Chief Justice John Roberts’ diary entry for May 13, 2012. We believe you will see it had a remarkable – and quite unexpected – influence on Chief Justice Roberts’ choice of judicial theory upon which he ultimately based his June 2012 majority opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius upholding the Affordable Care Act.
[Note: Directly below the sometimes difficult to read handwritten Roberts’ diary entry is a typewritten transcription.]
Below is the typewritten transcription.
Once at the new image, if needed, just click it again for an even larger version.)
Finally, for the very best version go here.
Political satire at its best. It's easily "Onion worthy," the magazine, not the veg.