Actually, rather than enhancing the legitimacy of SCOTUS with this ruling among the public, the Chief Justice seems to have damaged it:
Thirty-seven percent (37%) now believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, while 22% think it’s too conservative. A week ago, public opinion was much more evenly divided: 32% said it was too liberal and 25% said too conservative.
In the latest survey, 31% now believe the balance is about right.
That’s got to help Mitt Romney, if he makes court appointments a campaign issue.
I’ve never been a coffee drinker — it always seemed like an addiction to me, and I don’t want become one of those people who can’t function in the morning without it. I’d like to see the numbers on this study to determine whether or not it would be worth taking up the habit, given that I chose very bad parents when it comes to heart problems (though my general lifestyle is much different than theirs as well, since I’ve never smoked, and have a much better diet).
Solved: “Randy Barnett made a wish on a cursed monkey’s paw that his commerce clause argument would be accepted. It explains everything, no?”
Seriously, here’s what I think happened. Roberts initially voted with the others to throw out the whole law, and has spent the last several weeks trying to pick up at least one more vote (perhaps from Breyer or Sotomayor — Ginsburg and Kagan were never a possibility) to make it 6-3 instead of a narrow 5-4. At the end, he gave up, and decided to narrowly keep it instead of narrowly strike it down. I think that explains the facts, and the bizarre opinion, which was nowhere near as cogent and well thought out as what became the dissent. And I’ll bet that the new minority is pretty angry at him right now (and have been since he switched).
Nostalgia for when the media loved whistleblowers:
These days, in the Obama era, Democrats and the media seem a lot less admiring of whistleblowers, oddly enough. Imagine for a moment that Rowley had been assigned a new boss at the FBI after her whistleblowing, one that had told others that the agency needed to “get whatever dirt we can” on her to “take her down,” and especially if that boss had previously said in the presence of at least one witness that the FBI needed to “f**k” said whistleblower. Can you imagine the media meltdown that would have occurred? Well, you’re going to have to be satisfied with imagining it, but Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa want answers as to why two Operation Fast and Furious whistleblowers got assigned to work for a man who said exactly that about them.
If this were a Republican administration, there would be calls for impeachment.