Kathleen Parker has an excellent piece in the Washington Post today criticizing the Left’s attempt to intimidate Chief Justice Roberts into voting to uphold Obamacare. She notes that, in this case, the facts rival the legal and political intrigue of even John Grisham’s fiction. Some key excerpts:
I leave this debate to others more worthy, but the idea that decisions must be popular and/or bipartisan is silly on its face. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it “right” or legally correct. And, difficult as this is to accept in our Twitter culture, Supreme Court justices needn’t be popular.
Nevertheless, the left is pushing many such non-legal arguments, including that the court shouldn’t overturn a “popular” legislative act. Even the president advanced this argument as recently as last month, although the ACA is not, in fact, all that popular. . . .
Publicly chastising the court — and now taunting Roberts specifically — seems to have two purposes. One is to get under Roberts’s skin in the hopes that he’ll rule the “correct,” if not necessarily “legally correct,” way. Two is to lay the groundwork for declaring the court illegitimate if all or part of Obamacare is overturned.
Either way, it’s politics at its filthiest and is beneath the dignity of the court — and of the White House. Unfortunately for Roberts, it’s up to the chief justice to hold the bar high.