Former British Colony in Downward Spiral of Ethnic Violence, State Security Impunity

[Montmorency]

I think people read too much into Roberts as some master navigator with his finger always on the pulse of just how far he can go in making conservative decisions.
The dude has been working in the legal system his whole life and from what I can tell he is just a conservative dude who believes heavily in the legal process and the prestige of the SCOTUS.

If any of these conservative judges were full on shills, they wouldn't have a track record of shifting left: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...hey-get-older/

Roberts is not a political actor, and attempts to divine the output on any of these cases is always buried once the verdict is given and the ex post facto arguments come out. Of course he wouldn't push the abortion law at this moment...
No matter how well the Democrats do, they won't have the political strength in the Senate to remove him or anyone else from the court. At most Biden will replace Ginsburg and maybe Breyer, the conservatives will stay on until they die or another GOP president is elected, so if Roberts really wanted to kill Roe v Wade there was nothing stopping him from doing so right here and right now.

Like the rest of the conservative movement, Roberts is getting his reputation tarnished with the guilt by association that follows from him simply following his values during a Trump presidency. He is aware of the road he has to navigate in order to maintain the reputation of the institution he has spent is whole life in, but like all people he is flawed with his own biases and is not some stoic sage that can totally separate himself from his outputs.

@strike would have better understanding of whether his written arguments are in good faith or not.

We want to find the best account of Roberts' judicial behavior. The only accounts we can generate are of course ex post ones, but those are the ones that hopefully offer predictive power in the future.

We know for a fact that Roberts explicitly takes political considerations into his decision-making. Most notably in the ACA case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Roberts initially wanted to strike down the entire legislation on the basis of the invalidity of the individual mandate, but admitted concerns to his liberal colleagues about the perceived legitimacy of the act. He then negotiated with them, in a bona fide backroom deal, a limited holding that could split the difference. The end result was the preservation of the bulk of the legislation in exchange for the end of the automatic Medicaid expansion - the latter which Roberts initially considered constitutional.

Biskupic reports in detail for the first time on the machinations of the Obamacare case, revealing that Roberts started out in a different place. She writes that he initially voted with the four other conservatives to strike down the ACA, on the grounds that it went beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Likewise, he initially voted to uphold the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. But Roberts, who kept the opinion for himself to write, soon developed second thoughts.

Biskupic, who interviewed many of the justices for this book, including her subject, writes that Roberts said he felt “torn between his heart and his head.” He harbored strong views on the limitations of congressional power, but hesitated to interject the Court into the ongoing health-insurance crisis. After trying unsuccessfully to find a middle way with Kennedy, who was “unusually firm” and even “put off” by the courtship, Roberts turned to the Court’s two moderate liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The threesome negotiated a compromise decision that upheld the ACA’s individual mandate under Congress’s taxing power, while striking down the Medicaid expansion. Future scholars will endlessly probe this fascinating moment in judicial history, but Biskupic deserves credit for writing the first draft.

We know that Roberts does not care for precedent or established doctrine that much, as we saw in Shelby County when he decided a provision of law should no longer apply because he felt it was no longer needed. Or the fact that his SCOTUS has been one of the most active in overturning precedent.
https://www.acslaw.org/issue_brief/b...supreme-court/


Maybe if we looked more closely at the way Roberts decides different kinds of cases we would find some core principles after all? Or better said, core priorities. I'm not versed in the details but what I've gathered is that Roberts is especially given to decisions that limit labor rights, expand corporate rights, limit corporate regulations, and support the structural power (i.e. electoral advantage) of the Republican party. Whereas he may prioritize "social issues" less strongly, or may feel majoritarian pressures on those issues and take them into account.

(There is an idea floating around that the Supreme court orients its agents toward a more majoritarian posture than Congress/presidency actually have, because those are more responsive to factional pressures and polarization within the polity whereas the lifetime sinecures of a handful of magistrates generate... In other words, the argument is that SCOTUS is most sensitive to popular trends and therefore most majoritarian of the three branches in acceding to them as a legitimating measure. I don't understand the theory well enough to relate a strong version of it or say how fitting it sounds to me, but I would note that to the extent the court acts in a relatively majoritarian fashion it literally comes down to the decisions of one or two individuals, and I'm not sure then if that would be an institutionalized pattern or a more ad hoc "great man" thing. If you can find more on the concept do share.)

There have been multiple occasions already - one I recall was last year's census controversy - on which Roberts supported narrow (EDIT: procedural) decisions that rejected Republican arguments on the basis of being too crude and transparent, but explicitly allowed for the possibility of future shifts on the same substantive issues. In other words, 'bring me something less insulting to the intelligence next time.' This is exactly what the Trump admin did, by the way, with its 'third times the charm' travel ban iterations, with the last one being sufficiently transformed to be deemed acceptable by Roberts (and Kennedy in his last act). There is a certain etiquette, if that's the right word, that Roberts values above ones like Thomas or Alito.

Maybe we could put it as Roberts being a partisan, an ideological, and a strategic actor, with the lifetime sinecure of the Supreme Court affording him the opportunity to make independent decisions on the basis of his vision alone of what is right, what is best for country or party, and what befits his office.




BTW, I gave it a place above but some more photos of apex whiteness.

An armed couple came out of their house and pointed guns toward BLM protesters in the Central West End