The Right-Wing Backlash Against John Roberts

Brooks Kraft / Corbis

I've never been a fan of Chief Justice John Roberts and was not happy when he was confirmed by the Senate.  Anyone nominated by Chimperator George Bush was suspect in my eyes.  But now, I find myself feeling almost sorry for the man as the lunatics of the far right continue to be apoplectic over his action in upholding what the right derisively calls "Obamacare."  You would think that overnight Roberts had become a child molester or that he'd raped a nun on the altar of St. Peter's basilica.   The flying spittle and conniption fits seem to know few limits.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at how Roberts went from being a hero to the Kool-Aid drinkers to a object of scorn and derision.  I especially like the comment on Virginia's nasty piece of work that goes by the name Eric Cantor.  Here are highlights:

The reaction to Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion on health-care reform suggests that the GOP is morphing into the Monster Raving Loony Party—which actually exists in Britain but has never won a seat in Parliament. It also provides more evidence for the delusional conviction of today’s Republicans that they are ordained to rule—and if they don’t, it’s because of conspiracy, betrayal, and the sinister subversion of what they see as American ideals and the ideal America.

The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which channels a combination of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its ideological heroes, from Friedrich Hayek to Robert Bork, said Roberts had been “intimidated” by “the political class and legal left” and “swayed from [his] constitutional duties.” The chief justice was criticized for caring about the perceived legitimacy of the Supreme Court, which presumably is and should be one of his most important responsibilities.

The columnist Charles Krauthammer had already accused President Obama of “bully[ing]” the court after the administration had “lost” the oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act. It was a preemptive critique that ultimately proved to be remarkably unprescient.

This kind of whining was at the milder end of the loony spectrum. Right-wing radio talker Michael Savage claimed that Roberts’s epilepsy medicine had triggered “cognitive dissociation in what he is saying.” Glenn Beck called the chief justice a coward. There were calls for his impeachment.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor denounced the “black robes” for what they had just done to America. One is tempted to respond: better that than the white robes who once gathered at night in Cantor’s Virginia.

Mitt Romney, who apparently learned constitutional law at the Harvard Business School, or studied it in-between job destruction and offshoring deals, confidently proclaimed that health-care reform should have been thrown out: “I disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision.”

Hell hath no fury like a Tea Party GOP steamed that a majority of the Supreme Court refused to drink the right-wing Kool-Aid. Isn’t it conceivable that the Republicans lost the case on the merits, just as they lost fair and square in Congress on the stimulus, financial reform, and the health-care law itself? That view is essential to a functioning democracy, but alien to an opposition now loyal only to its own self-righteous dogmatism. 

The right appears ready to shred any institution and promote any myth to assure its success or explain its failures. But the conspiracy theory that the chief justice changed or “capitulated,” as The Wall Street Journal alleged, is confounded by the reality, too little noticed at the time, that he previewed the guiding principle of his decision during the oral arguments in March. 

As the right wing backlash raged, Roberts, who was preparing to leave for a meeting in Malta, joked to a conference of judges and lawyers that he was headed for “an impregnable island fortress. It seemed like a good idea.” The rest of America is left to contend with a Republican Party whose attitude seems to be “my way or it was highway robbery,” a party that sees intrigue in every issue and a plot in every Obama policy, or even in his mere presence in the White House.

But the beast must be fed; Republican politicians have to satisfy a base that instinctively, bitterly, rejects anything and everything that comes from Obama as fundamentally un-American. Many in that base just can’t abide an African-American in the White House.

The resulting backlash to this, the grievance and paranoia, have been harnessed to the self-interest of plutocrats like the Koch brothers, the supermen of the super PACs. They don’t share or care about the Snopesian reflex against diversity and equality, except as it suits their own ends. They play on it to trick people into voting against themselves, against their own economic prospects, in order to restore the era of the robber barons.

There's more on the psychotic nature of the GOP base which is worth a read.  One truly cannot be a Republican nowadays unless one is either mentally ill or consumed by greed and a desire to rob from the poor to give to the wealthy.  It's an upside down world view that is very scary.