Former President Barack Obama often attacked the Supreme Court. During his 2010 State of the Union address he lectured the justices in the audience in the Capitol about how, in his view, they decided the famous Citizens United case wrongly. He also used his bully pulpit to warn the justices not to overturn the Obamacare law, his signature legislative accomplishment.
That political agitation worked, according to Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, which advocates for “restoring the Founder’s vision of a federal judiciary governed by the rule of law and anchored by the Constitution,” according to its website.
“In 2012 Obama basically warned the Supreme Court not to make the wrong decision in the Obamacare case, and of course, Chief Justice John Roberts did not rule the wrong way, according to Obama’s perspective,” Levey told The Epoch Times in an interview.
In NFIB v. Sebelius, decided June 28, 2012, Roberts sided with liberal justices in a 5-4 vote to uphold the statute, finding that the individual mandate, which required consumers to buy health insurance even if they didn’t want it, was a valid exercise of the congressional power to tax.
But Roberts voted the opposite way earlier in the private judicial conference that followed oral arguments, Levey said. Roberts switched sides after Democrats applied pressure by publicly questioning the court’s legitimacy, he said.
...Levey said Whitehouse’s brief [in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. City of New York] was “an overt threat and it is coming from a fairly radical group of Democratic senators who hate the fact that the Supreme Court is center-right at the moment.”
In the ruling Roberts joined the four liberal justices, as he did in the Obamacare decision, finding the Trump administration’s claim that a citizenship question needed to be added to the 2020 census to gather data to help enforce the Voting Rights Act “seems to have been contrived.”
“Sure enough, Roberts went out of his way not to anger liberals in his census decision” June 27 in the case of Department of Commerce v. New York, Levey said...