A pro-business conservative, he understood the importance of the insurance industry to US businesses, and he was genuinely concerned about invalidating an entire law that had been approved through the democratic process to solve the intractable health care problem. But his four fellow conservatives believed that if the individual mandate was going down, it should take the whole law with it.
They believed all the pieces were interlocked. Roberts thought the individual mandate was entwined with only two other provisions, those known as the "community rating" and "guaranteed issue. The guaranteed-issue section required insurers to cover people regardless of pre-existing conditions. As was his prerogative as chief justice, Roberts chose to write the majority opinion, giving him the ability to shape what the court would ultimately say. Senior liberal justice Ginsburg was ready to write for the dissenting foursome.
Soon after, Roberts began trying to persuade Kennedy to find that the unconstitutional insurance requirement could be severed from the rest of the law. But Kennedy -- often a swing vote on high-profile cases -- was firm in his position. He was puzzled, and then put off, by Roberts' view that the ACA provisions could be severed. The deal is struck. Later in April, Roberts tried another path. He began exploring whether, as the Obama administration had argued, the individual mandate could be upheld as a tax.
CBS's Jan Crawford reported earlier on Roberts' reversal on the mandate, but the full story of Roberts' switch, including on Medicaid expansion, and the changed votes of two liberal justices is detailed now for the first time. The chief justice then turned to Breyer and Kagan, the liberals most likely to work with him on contentious issues, to see if they could find common ground.
At the same time, Roberts began incorporating arguments that would invalidate the Medicaid expansion. This was a strange turn. None of the lower courts that had taken up the ACA had rejected the Medicaid expansion, and it wasn't seen as controversial in terms of constitutional debate and public controversy.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an unlikely fitness role model. Roberts posited in a draft opinion that Congress had in effect held "a gun to the head" of the states by conditioning all Medicaid money on the expanded coverage. Yet he was not prepared to find that the expansion had to be scrapped altogether, only that states could not be forced to join through the leverage of losing all Medicaid funding. Breyer and Kagan had voted in the private March conference to uphold the new Medicaid requirement, and their votes had been unequivocal.
But they were pragmatists. If there was a chance that Roberts would cast the critical vote to uphold the central plank of Obamacare -- and negotiations in May were such that they still considered that a shaky proposition -- they were willing to meet him partway.
When Ginsburg found out about Roberts' new position, her first thought was, "It ain't over till it's over. So it isn't at all something extraordinary, and that's how it should work. We're in the process of trying to persuade each other and then the public," she told me in a interview in her chambers. At the time, Ginsburg knew that Roberts was not deviating from his view of limited commerce clause power, and she wanted to make her dissent as persuasive as possible. Another complication for Ginsburg was that in late spring she had fallen on the marble floor of her bathroom and cracked several ribs.
There was nothing to be done except to work through the pain. Scalia and the other conservatives were livid at the development. Scalia believed the taxing-power possibility had never truly been discussed in court, calling it a "fly-by-night briefing. Trump fires back after Roberts rebukes him The announcement. The decision was revealed on June 28, the last courtroom sitting of the session. While he has voted consistently with the conservative bloc on social issues, such as abortion rights and racial policies, Roberts in his public remarks has suggested that he seeks, as chief, to transcend an ideological label.
Indeed, in his comments during oral arguments in the healthcare case, Roberts hinted that he could be open to siding with the government.
He expressed concern that the court over which he presides might be seen as ignoring more than 75 years of precedent and rolling back U. The last time the Supreme Court struck down a major act of Congress was in , when the court invalidated a federal law that limited work hours and prescribed minimum wages for coal workers.
He is in this for the long haul. He also rejected the prevailing view of Republican politicians, who had been his strongest backers when President George W.
The appeals court case, heard in New Orleans on Tuesday , may also complicate the legacy of the chief justice, who has attempted to keep the Supreme Court out of politics but could soon face another presidential election-year health care dispute. Roberts, a appointee of Republican George W. Bush, forged a compromise in with the four Supreme Court liberal justices to uphold the signature domestic achievement of Obama.
The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare. In dramatic moves behind the scenes, Roberts shifted multiple times in that landmark Obamacare challenge.
After the case was argued, Roberts was part of a five-justice majority that wanted to strike down the individual insurance mandate. But he became wary of voiding a significant part of the law that was years in the making and reconsidered. Read More. That eventual decision has shaped public perceptions of the chief justice, who since then has been viewed with skepticism by conservatives even as his record -- for example, on racial issues, campaign finance and religion -- remains solidly on the right.
Roberts' opinion is now at the center of the legal debate seven years later. His rationale for upholding the ACA's individual insurance mandate was tied to Congress' taxing power.
Texas and other Republican-led states, backed by the Trump administration, contend that when Congress zeroed out the tax penalty in for people who failed to obtain insurance, it eviscerated its constitutional grounds. As he did at oral argument , Scalia also showed himself as embarrassingly out of touch with American politics circa The idea that these states would act to cooperate — or simply in the best interests of their citizens — this time is absurd.
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