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Columbus
Dispatch…
Author
digs into politicized
relationship between president, high-court conservatives
By
Jack Torry
September 23, 2012
WASHINGTON
— When the U.S. Supreme
Court last spring upheld the key feature of the 2010 health-care law,
stunned
legal conservatives turned their fury on Chief Justice John Roberts,
who
provided the pivotal fifth vote to keep most of the law intact. How
could a
conservative chief justice betray conservatives and Republicans by
upholding the
key legislative achievement of President Barack Obama?
Jeffrey
Toobin, CNN analyst and
author of the best-selling The Nine, not only provides the answer in
his new
book, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, but also
places it
in the broader context of what he calls the “evolution” of the
Republican
Party, which has shuffled so far to the right that it would not be
recognized
by the moderate Republicans who dominated the party in the 1960s and
early
1970s.
In
that sense, Toobin’s exceptionally
readable book is more than just an inside look at the largely secretive
way the
justices operate. He blends strong reporting with a sure historical
grasp of
the court to present a persuasive argument that the five conservatives
who
control the court have embarked on a deliberate course to demolish
well-accepted precedents on campaign finance, gun control and abortion
rights.
“The
modern Republican justices
reflect the modern Republican Party,” Toobin said in a phone interview
last
week.
The
sole high-profile exception was
the health-care law. Relying on interviews with a “majority” of the
justices
and more than 40 of their law clerks, Toobin details how Roberts
strayed from
conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and
Clarence
Thomas to join the court’s four liberals and salvage the key section of
the
law.
Although
Roberts seemingly has
never met a legal precedent he liked, he seemed to shrink from the
abyss of
striking down Obama’s signature achievement. Toobin argues that Roberts
was
motivated as much by self-preservation as anything else, writing that
“Roberts
had dual goals for his tenure as chief justice — to push his own
ideological
agenda but also to preserve the court’s place as a respected final
arbiter of
the nation’s disputes.”
Read
the rest of the article at Columbus
Dispatch
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