I‘m willing to bet that Chief Justice John Roberts was, at one time, a math major in college, even if only briefly.
I’m a columnist now, but when I was in college, I majored in math. In class after class, my professors would state the theorem, then spend the remainder of the time writing a lengthy proof for it on the blackboard.
“I’m not trying to pull a fast one here,” a prof would say from time to time. What he meant was that he wasn’t trying to slip some shoddy, weak reasoning into the argument to make his proof come out correctly.
Last week, in the Obamacare decision, Roberts pulled a fast one. In fact, the fast one he pulled was the proverbial lollapalooza, a classic. Consider it a “fast one” tour de force.
Roberts was among the five-justice majority that ruled to uphold Obamacare. In reading from the majority opinion, the chief justice declared — rightly — that Congress could not make individual citizens buy a certain product or service under its Commerce Clause powers.
Everybody in the country with a clue already knew that, of course. Everybody, that is, except a man named Barack Hussein Obama. And all his myrmidons, who blindly followed him when he proclaimed that Congress, under the clause that allows that legislature to regulate commerce, could indeed force individuals to purchase health insurance.
The rest of us know the clear difference between the words “compel” and “regulate.” Congress forcing citizens to buy health insurance isn’t “regulating” commerce in any meaning of the word “regulate.” That’s compelling commerce.
For Obama and all his supporters who backed Obamacare, the words “compel” and “regulate” mean precisely the same thing. They see no difference.
The Commerce Clause part of Roberts’ ruling should have brought deep thinkers like Obama back to the real world, or at least have sent them scurrying to check out the nearest dictionary. But then Roberts pulled his fast one in the next part of his opinion. Under Obamacare, Congress can impose a penalty on those who don’t buy health insurance. That penalty, Roberts said, is a tax, which Congress can impose.
So here, in a nutshell, is the phenomenon that might be called “RobertsThink”: Congress can’t compel you to buy a product or service as a part of its powers to regulate commerce, but it can tax you for not buying what it is you’re not compelled to buy in the first place.
My own take on the Roberts ruling: “bizarre.” Others have chosen their own words. “Roberts’ reasoning is intellectually, ideologically, and legally perverse — willfully so, in fact,” wrote John Podhoretz in the July/August edition of Commentary magazine. “And no matter how you slice it, such perversity is not good argument, good intellection, or good leadership by the nation’s most powerful thinker.”
The chief justice is, to many Americans, “the nation’s most powerful thinker.” Or at least he’s supposed to be. Lately, that role has gone to those dissenting from recent Supreme Court decisions.
In the ruling where justices gutted Arizona’s law attempting to give that state control over its borders federal officials clearly don’t want it to have, it was Justice Antonin Scalia.
In the Obamacare case, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority in each of those cases. That should be to his everlasting shame.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
