I crossed paths with Chief Justice John Roberts over the weekend, and it got me to thinking. If it wasn’t for him, the stakes in this presidential election would be an awful lot lower.
If Roberts had not decided to shock the world, Obamacare would be dead as a doornail. When you consider that the four dissenting justices – Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy – went beyond what most observers had expected by declaring not just the individual mandate, but the entire law unconstitutional, the federal government’s seizure of 15% of the nation’s economy would have ended had Roberts seen fit to simply do the same thing as his fellow strict constructionist travelers – and even one not considered a strict constructionist – on the highest court of the land.
True, you say, but that’s just Obamacare. How about all the rest of this president’s programs and policies – the stimulus, the onslaught of far-reaching energy and small business regulations, a foreign policy of distancing our friends and embracing our adversaries, and a host of other policies reflecting the leftist ideology of this most leftist of all American presidents?
Well, the stimulus was largely a failure, but it’s history and there will be no follow-on as long as there continues to be a Republican house, which is a virtual certainty. And no further significant legislation championed by Barack Obama, including higher taxes, will become law with the GOP controlling at least one chamber of congress. The coal industry is on life support, but even Barack Obama can not stand in the way of the explosion in natural gas discovery and production. A foreign policy of disengagement and appeasement will certainly accelerate our already weakening standing in the world, but there are some things we will be compelled to do whether this president likes it or not, such as standing with Israel if not at the start, at least at the finish, of any unilateral Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear development facilities.
Even untethered from any further accountability to the electorate, the amount of damage Barack Obama would be able to do in a divided government would be limited.
But Obamacare, the tipping point between a constitutional republic and a social democracy, would become a fixture. By the time the next presidential election rolls around in 2016, this 2300 page monstrosity – complete with its crushing regulatory and tax burdens, mandates and unsustainable costs – would have been the law of the land for a full six years. And history has demonstrated that entrenched entitlement programs are never abolished, with the lone exception of the widely and wildly reviled federal welfare program known as AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children – reformed/overturned in 1996 to include stringent work requirements, which Obama, true to his leftist ideology, has attempted to weaken by presidential fiat that clearly exceeds his constitutional authority).
Constitutionalists certainly understand what is at stake in this election, and despite their skepticism about Mitt Romney, they know he will repeal Obamacare. And while they appear likely to show up in perhaps record numbers to vote against Obama, the stakes would not be nearly as high, and a great burden would have been lifted in the land, if Justice Roberts had just done the right thing. The obvious thing. But instead, he ultimately not only sided with the leftist justices, but delivered an opinion that allowed the left to get away with murder. He re-classified the penalty for refusing to comply with the individual mandate as a tax, something government counsel had not even sought, and which Democrats had always scrupulously avoided doing, for they knew the bill would never pass if they did.
Well, you say, this is the fault of the GOP, not Roberts. Obamacare was foisted upon us because Republicans were so weak in 2008 that they got routed in the presidential election, and couldn’t muster a majority in the house or even a filibuster-size minority in the senate. That’s not Roberts’ problem, and we can’t expect him to fix in the judicial branch what was duly approved by the legislative branch. True enough, in a vacuum. But the US Constitution calls for the Supreme Court to do exactly that if a law exceeds the enumerated powers of the legislative or executive branches. And four justices – including the centrist Anthony Kennedy – felt the violations were sufficiently clear to shoot down the entire law.
In the end, if Obama wins a second term, one man will be ultimately bear responsibility for the biggest federal government power grab in generations. And that one man won’t be Obama, for he had the assistance of many a leftist cohort – including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who like Obama have long favored a single payer system, i.e. complete government takeover of health care, and who were actually responsible for drafting the legislation. And almost 300 House and Senate Democrats voted for it.
Indeed, any of that one man’s future opinions and rulings will hardly matter. His sad legacy will be etched in stone as the single individual who could have relegated Obamacare to the ash heap of history’s discredited and discarded ideas…but refused to do so.
That one man is John Roberts.
