The health care case is decided but the jury, it appears, is still out on John Roberts. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the chief justice is either a statesman or a coward; a pragmatist or a patsy of the liberal media; a modern John Marshall or another David Souter (whose moderation on the bench made his name, to conservatives, the foulest of epithets); and his willingness to save President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment is either an act of courage or, according to certain right-wing commentators, “cognitive dissociation” caused by antiepileptic drugs.
Whatever else he might be, John Roberts is a Rorschach test. We squint our eyes at Roberts and see, in blurry but corporeal form, our deepest hopes or fears about his court and judges generally. That is why reactions to his decision on the Affordable Care Act have fallen into two familiar archetypes — competing caricatures of judges either as oracles of truth and wisdom, or “junior varsity politicians,” as Justice Stephen Breyer has put it (in contesting the charge). Both notions have their obvious appeal, but they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the work of judges, and the role they should play in our system of self-government.
The groping for credible explanations of Roberts’ decision, and the resort to easy, flimsy ones, is understandable. It can be maddeningly difficult, even impossible, to know what drives a judicial decision. Supreme Court justices speak to us primarily through their published opinions, but the reasoning in those opinions is often unclear or inconsistent. What Roberts delivered last week was especially so. The chief justice wrote, in a real sense, two clashing opinions: one expanding (or at least tolerating) federal power when it takes the form of a tax, the other likely to restrict federal power under a novel and, in the view of most constitutional scholars, artificial reading of the Commerce Clause.
It is a mistake to think we can divine, from these clues, how we got here — or, as a result, where “here” actually is. The report that Roberts switched his vote, holding fast with his new liberal allies despite “relentless” lobbying by Justice Anthony Kennedy, is gripping stuff; it appeals to our very healthy interest in what goes on behind that red velvet curtain. But in the end it only heightens the mystery about Roberts’ motivation. The unsatisfying truth is that we will probably never know why he did what he did. Was it out of concern for the legitimacy of the court? Was it out of compassion for the tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise lack health care coverage? Or was it, as some have surmised, a shrewd sort of self-inoculation against charges of partisanship — in advance of a Supreme Court term that may mark the end of the Voting Rights Act and race-conscious affirmative action?
