Is John Roberts To Blame For Donald Trump?

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 vote to side with the majority and save the Affordable Care Act led Tea Party activists to believe they would never find relief from the courts, and made them turn to Donald Trump—at least according to the conservative blogosphere – writes New York Times legal analyst Linda Greenhouse. The theory, which displays a “mind-clouding obsession with the Affordable Care Act,” also seeks to demonize Roberts for practicing the exact type of judicial restraint that conservatives had previously demanded. In an odd flip, conservatives seem to be maligning Roberts’ hesitancy to overturn laws as his major flaw. “It’s judicial restraint that’s political,” Greenhouse writes. “Are conservatives at all abashed at taking the vocabulary they grew up with and flipping it so openly? I see little sign of that … [the] fear of judicial restraint runs deep.”