John Roberts---Chief Weenie of the SCOTUS

James Taranto keeps knocking the ball out of the park. Here's his take on Jan Crawford's revelation and then a Prof Campos followup about CJ Roberts changing his mind after he wrote the first two-thirds of the DISSENT!

....CBS's Jan Crawford, citing "two sources with specific knowledge" of the Supreme Court's deliberations in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare case, had reported that Chief Justice John Roberts initially voted to hold the individual mandate unconstitutional, then changed his mind. But Crawford's sources denied speculation that the dissent was originally drafted by Roberts as a majority opinion.

Now a competing story has emerged. Lefty law prof Paul Campos writes at Salon.com that "a source within the court with direct knowledge of the drafting process" tells him that, to quote the unnamed source, "most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts' chambers in April and May." (The Campos story does not dispute that Roberts switched his vote, and indeed makes sense only if he did.)

National Review's John Fund adds:

I've learned from my own sources that after voting to invalidate the mandate, the chief did express some skepticism about joining the four conservatives in throwing out the whole law. At the justices' conference, there was discussion about accepting the Obama administration's argument, which was that, if the individual mandate was removed, the provisions governing community rating and guaranteed issue of insurance would have to go too but that the rest of the law might stand. The chief justice was equivocal, though, in his views on that point.

Fund's account is consistent with either Crawford's or Campos's. Unlike them, he does not say if his sources were court insiders. What's most striking about these accounts, though, is not the particular details but that we are reading them at all. Politics and law aside, it suggests the Roberts Court has a managerial debacle on its hands.

Whoever the sources are, it appears that both the four conservative [and eventually dissenting] justices and the four liberal [and eventual affirming justices] are pissed off at Roberts, which means besides a political and managerial debacle, Roberts has an internal feud going on which centers on himself. The affirming liberals feign anger that Roberts declared the mandate supported by the Commerce Clause as unconstitutional. And the conservatives are angry that Roberts allowed the stupid law to stand because4 it could be interpreted as a tax if insurance was not bought. [Obama & his chorus of liars deny it is a tax EVEN THOUGH Obama's Solicitor General argued exactly this before the SCOTUS....!!!! [Of course, for Obama to lie is like for the sun to rise in the morning....just part of nature itself]. But here is Taranto explaining it all:

A chief justice can lead the court only through the power of persuasion. That is to say, ironically, that the leader of the government's nonpolitical branch has to rely entirely on political skill in order to be effective. Earl Warren, who actually was a politician (three-term California governor), famously employed such skill in 1954, when he gradually persuaded all eight associate justices to join his opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, in the belief that unanimity would be helpful in overcoming popular resistance to the ruling.

Almost everyone surmises that Roberts's motives for upholding ObamaCare were political. Putting aside the merits of the respective cases, his political performance--that is, his performance as the court's leader--contrasts dismally with Warren's in 1954.

Crawford reports that Roberts "engaged in his own lobbying effort--trying to persuade at least Justice [Anthony] Kennedy to join his decision so the Court would appear more united in the case." Not only did that effort fail, but Roberts ended up with the exact opposite of a unanimous decision. He was on his own, with the four dissenters refusing even to acknowledge his opinion, and the four justices who agreed with him on the outcome joining a bitter concurrence in which they upbraided his reasoning on the case's central constitutional question.

Talk about jumping the shark and ending up everyone's dinner, Roberts may have seriously handicapped himself as far as future leadership of the SCOTUS is concerned.