Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., argued that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts upheld Obamacare in order to help Republicans, analysis he offered to buttress the idea that the court’s five Republican nominees are partisan jurists.

“I think there is a very strong case to be made that the best political decision that the Republicans could have gotten out of the court was that one,” Whitehouse told the Washington Examiner while discussing Roberts’ conclusion, much maligned on the right, that the individual mandate qualified as a tax for constitutional purposes.