Brent Bozell As To Why Roberts Changed

| Opinion

               

Is anyone surprised that the ink wasn’t dry on Chief Justice John Roberts’ incoherent switcheroo before team Obama was again denying ObamaCare is a tax? Why did he do it?

There is no doubt that the left waged a war on the court’s public image. Just as Obama lectured the justices during his State of the Union address for the Citizens United decision, so Obama and his media minions prepared for this verdict with blatant mob pressure: Side with us or your image is ruined.

For liberal journalists, repeal of ObamaCare was tantamount to a deadly third strike. Strike One was Bush versus Gore, which caused a liberal scream-fest that continues in some quarters to this day. Strike Two was the Citizens United campaign-finance case; in the leftist worldview, all major tipping points of public policy should be controlled by the state.

In the media’s twisted lingo, upholding the Constitution would be “partisan.” Mangling it would be “nonpartisan.” This routine was sickening to watch from beginning to end, especially the way liberal journalists switched on a dime in finding that Roberts had transformed himself from rejectionist tea party villain to savior of the high court.

NBC’s David Gregory earned the blue ribbon for partisan plasticity. Hours before the verdict, he drew the nightmare scenario of an overturned ObamaCare law: “What happens if it is struck down in part or in whole by a 5-to-4 decision? Would that not underscore how dysfunctional our government is ... ? That is a real nightmare scenario, I think, for the political class in this country.”

Got that? The media class informs the political class and the judicial class that either Obama wins or there’s going to be public-relations hell to pay. Then the decision came out.

Within minutes, there was Gregory, finding the same 5-4 score going in Obama’s favor wasn’t dysfunctional after all. It was terrific: “Chief Justice Roberts ... has spoken publicly about how on big controversial decisions, he thinks a 5-4 majority on the court over time undermines the Supreme Court and only fuels the view that our major political institutions are too polarized. He’s taken a big step here.”

It’s a “big step” to sign up with the socialist justices who can’t find a limitation to government anywhere in the Constitution.

Then there was Chris Matthews, whose approach to Roberts went from holding a pitchfork and a torch to holding a bouquet of roses. On the night before the verdict, Matthews told his guests that a fellow Catholic said Roberts “doesn’t want to be the second Roger Taney. Roger Taney, of course, was a Roman Catholic who upheld the Fugitive Slave Law back before the Civil War and was villainized throughout history because of that.”

So overturning ObamaCare is just like returning all the fugitive slaves to their Southern masters. But when Roberts caved to the left, now it was a “bold, defiant, grand decision.”

Someone clearly pressed Roberts to cry “uncle.” He is a traitor to strict constitutionalism, whether he folded to Obama or to his image-manufacturing bullies in the media. The Constitution to him and his liberal friends is simply Play-Doh in the hands of our governing elites.

It looks like when November comes, “We the People” will be the last recourse to keep the Constitution from the shredder.

L. Brent Bozell III is president of the Media Research Center.