CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS IS BREAKING WITH CONSERVATIVES. HERE’S WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF THE SUPREME COURT
Kevin Daley
DailyCaller.com
03/13/2019
Chief Justice John Roberts has voted with the liberal justices in recent months on cases touching abortion, asylum and the death penalty.
Those votes may not indicate a meaningful change to the chief justice’s legal views.
Rather, they could reflect Roberts’s desire to keep the Supreme Court away from division, or an incremental approach to a conservative revival.
Chief Justice John Roberts has made common cause with the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc as late, breaking with his conservative colleagues on cases relating to abortion, the death penalty and President Donald Trump’s revised rules for asylum seekers.
Whether Roberts’s recent maneuvers reflect a substantive change in his approach to cases remains to be seen. In isolation, it’s difficult to know what to make of the chief’s votes.
That he is parting with his conservative legal views seems unlikely. This, after all, is a jurist who voted to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and strike down limits on firearms possession, corporate campaign expenditures and all manner of race-conscious benefits. Yet his recent moves are all the more interesting for that very reason.
Abortion
Roberts has twice sided with the liberal justices on abortion-related cases. In the first instance, the chief and Justice Brett Kavanaugh voted against review of a lower court decision favoring Planned Parenthood in December 2018. That petition did not directly broach abortion rights.
The case arose when Louisiana and Kansas disqualified Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, from eligibility for state Medicaid funds. Planned Parenthood sued in turn, claiming the Medicaid law allowed it to circumvent a state administrative proceeding and bring its challenge straight to a federal judge.
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