printHERE are excerpts from “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts,” now on RT.
Is John G. Roberts Jr. no more than a smooth operator, I wondered on September 15 2005.
I began tracking the now infamous Justice Roberts a month earlier, around the time he was exciting admiration from gay-rights activists for winning “Romer vs. Evans” for them. The Los Angeles Times, at the time, noted that “Romer vs. Evans” had “struck down a voter-approved 1992 Colorado initiative that would have allowed employers and landlords to exclude gays from jobs and housing.”
Gay activists still consider the decision Roberts won for them the “single most important positive ruling in the history of the gay rights movement.” Special pleading not being this column’s “thing,” arguments from and against so-called gay rights did not sway me much.
Rather, I urged readers to pay attention to Roberts’ efforts against the private property and freedom of association of Coloradans. “When property is rendered insecure,” said Edmund Burke, “so is liberty.”
Alas, Roberts’ (pro bono) work comported with 14th-Amendment jurisprudence, aspects of which violate private property rights and freedom of association. Simply put, to the extent that the Constitution coincides with the natural law, it is good. More often than not, it has buried natural justice under the rubble of legislation and statute.
My choice for the Supreme Court of the United States, back when President Bush was pushing the goofy Harriet Myers, was Justice Janice Rogers Brown. An originalist, Justice Brown is also black. Pigment, however, only works in favor of candidates of the Left.
“Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract.” This was just one of Justice Brown’s many admirable utterances. (Today’s brazen cannibals would object to Brown’s maligning as vociferously as the obese derided this writer for telling the truth about their fat and flaccid icon, Citizen Karen Klein.) …
… But, here’s the thing that unsettled so about Roberts’ performance during confirmation proceedings. Or so I wrote on September 15, 2005:
“He seems to be all about the moves” …
READ the complete column. “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” is now on RT.
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UPDATE I: “A vast new federal power to ‘tax'” has been birthed by the philosophical successor to chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, the “intellectual progenitor of federal power”:
No one can know the true motivations for the idiosyncratic rationale in the health-care decision written by Marshall’s current successor, John Roberts. … Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts really means what he wrote – that congressional power to tax is without constitutional limit – and his opinion is a faithful reflection of that view, without a political or legal or intra-court agenda. But that view finds no support in the Constitution or our history. It even contradicts the most famous of Marshall’s big government aphorisms: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
The reasoning underlying the 5-to-4 majority opinion is the court’s unprecedented pronouncement that Congress’ power to tax is unlimited. The majority held that the extraction of thousands of dollars per year by the IRS from individuals who do not have health insurance is not a fine, not a punishment, not a payment for government-provided health insurance, not a shared responsibility – all of which the statute says it is – but rather is an inducement in the form of a tax.
“The logic in the majority opinion is the jurisprudential equivalent of passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The logic is so tortured, unexpected and unprecedented that even the law’s most fervent supporters did not make or anticipate the court’s argument in its support. …”
UPDATE II (July 6):
From: J
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 11:49 AM
To: Ilana Mercer
Subject: Recent article
Your article today was excellent.
Most notably the part about how Roberts answered the question posed by the Senator about the administrative state….. so true. That’s our biggest problem in this country because half of all “conservatives” are for it. Very strange how he steered around the question.
J.