WASHINGTON — When he was up for confirmation to the Supreme Court, John Roberts famously compared his job to an umpire in baseball, making sure that everybody plays by the rules.
“But it is a limited role,” Roberts added. “Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”
The umpire took center stage Thursday as the Republican-appointed chief justice who upheld President Barack Obama’s health-care law, delighting liberals who have long despised him and enraging conservatives who considered him one of their own.
The decision stunned legal observers on both sides and made Roberts the focus of heated invective from conservative activists and some Republican members of Congress, who derided him as a “traitor.” Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, talked about the possibility of removing Roberts and other justices from the bench.
But many of those familiar with Roberts’ thinking say the calibrated decision is fully in keeping with the outlook of a studious former Catholic schoolboy who made his way to be first in his class at Harvard - conservative in his views but also reverent toward institutions.
“It underscores that the chief basically does what he thinks is the right interpretation of the law and not what is necessarily popular or needed to curry favor,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard University law professor who is close to Roberts. “He takes on both sides and steers his own path here and also steers a path for the court. He is very much in control.”
Roberts, 57, is nothing if not self-confident, according to many who have known him throughout the years, a personable and meticulous persuader who spent much of his career in the heights of the Washington political and legal establishment.
Roberts may have sided with liberals to save the signature domestic achievement of Obama’s presidency, but he also gave conservatives legal beachheads that could pay off down the road. He abandoned his perch as one of the court’s consistent conservatives to play peacemaker between liberals ready to uphold the law in full and conservatives who wanted to pull the plug.
And he did it all without the help of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who most often plays the tie-breaker role that Roberts assumed Thursday.
“There’s no question this was a moment of truth for John Roberts,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor and Supreme Court expert at George Washington University. “He had to decide what kind of court he wanted to preside over.”
Roberts’ opinion, which was written under his own name and had the effect of controlling the entire case, contained two main facets. He sided with conservatives in finding that the government could not, under the Constitution’s commerce clause, require most Americans to buy insurance. And he placed limits on what the government could demand of states in expanding Medicaid coverage.
But Roberts sided with the court’s liberal wing in finding that the insurance mandate is constitutional as a tax.
“If you told people that there were four solid votes to strike down the whole thing, I think most people ... would have been surprised to find that among the four would have been Justice Kennedy and not Chief Justice Roberts,” said Paul Clement, who represented a group of 26 states that challenged the health-care law.
The commentary from the right was brutal. Activist Brent Bozell called Roberts “a traitor to his philosophy” who “is forever stained in the eyes of conservatives.” Richard Viguerie of ConservativeHQ.com called the ruling a “21st-century Dred Scott decision,” referring to the court’s 1857 finding that slaves had no rights.
“It’s an extremely disappointing ruling, particularly with Roberts so amazingly rewriting the law in order to uphold it,” Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said.
Many regular critics of Roberts, by contrast, praised the ruling, including Obama, who voted against Roberts’ confirmation while he was a U.S. senator and has publicly clashed with him over rulings on corporate political spending and other issues while president. Many Democrats had argued that a partisan ruling against Obama’s health-care legislation would have irrevocably damaged Roberts’ and the court’s credibility.
“The court stepped back from the brink,” said Walter Dellinger, a deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.
On Friday, Roberts joked that he’ll spend some time on an “impregnable island fortress” now that the court has ended a session that featured him casting the decisive vote on Obama’s health-care law.
Responding to a question about his summer break, Roberts said he planned to teach a class for two weeks in Malta, the Mediterranean island nation.
“Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress. It seemed like a good idea,” Roberts said, drawing laughter from about 300 judges, attorneys and others attending a four-day conference Friday at a posh southwestern Pennsylvania resort.
Roberts said during his 2005 confirmation hearing that he was “not an ideologue” and decided cases on pragmatic grounds: “I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case. I tend to look at the cases from the bottom up rather than the top down.” Information for this article was contributed by Joe Mandak of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 06/30/2012