Report: John Roberts Wrote the Bulk of the Dissenting ObamaCare Decision That He Voted Against
Did Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts write both the majority ruling and the dissenting opinion in the ObamaCare case? Earlier this week, CBS News reported that Roberts switched his vote late in the process after initially voting against the law's individual mandate, writing the majority opinion and saving the law in the process.
Now, at Salon, law professor Paul Campos writes that sources inside the high court tell him that a substantial portion of the final dissenting opinion signed jointly by Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito was in fact initially drafted inside John Roberts' chambers:
My source insists that "most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts' chambers in April and May." Only the last portion of what eventually became the joint dissent was drafted without any participation by the chief justice.
This source insists that the claim that the joint dissent was drafted from scratch in June is flatly untrue. Furthermore, the source characterizes claims by Crawford's sources that "the fact that the joint dissent doesn't mention [sic] Roberts' majority … was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him" as "pure propagandistic spin," meant to explain away the awkward fact that while the first 46 pages of the joint dissent never even mention Roberts' opinion for the court (this is surely the first time in the court's history that a dissent has gone on for 13,000 words before getting around to mentioning that it is, in fact, dissenting), the last 19 pages do so repeatedly.
The twist ending that no one expected!
