Roundup: Media's Take

Jeffrey Rosen: Welcome to the Roberts Court: How the Chief Justice Used Obamacare to Reveal His True Identity

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.In 2006, at the end of his first term as Chief Justice, John Roberts told me that he was determined to place the bipartisan legitimacy of the Court above his own ideological agenda. But he recognized the difficulty of the task. “It’s sobering to think of the seventeen chief justices,” he said. “Certainly a solid majority of them have to be characterized as failures.”Specifically, he was concerned that his colleagues were too often handing down 5-4 decisions that divided along predictable party lines, which made it hard for the public to maintain faith in the Court as an institution that transcends politics. Roberts pledged to try to persuade his colleagues to avoid party line votes in the most divisive cases. Roberts said he would embrace as his model his judicial hero, John Marshall, who sometimes engaged in legal “twistifications,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s derisive phrase, in order to achieve results that would strengthen the institutional legitimacy of the Court.

Robert Merry: George W. Bush: Still the Worst

Robert Merry has been a Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Executive Editor of the Congressional Quarterly. In 2003, President Bush, then two years into his tenure, was asked by journalist Bob Woodward about his place in history. “History,” he replied. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” This is a remarkable statement from any president, suggesting a blithe attitude toward the job’s magnitude and responsibility to posterity. Compare this insouciance, as historian Sean Wilentz did in a searing Rolling Stone piece on the younger Bush, with another president’s observation on the subject. “Fellow citizens,” said Lincoln, “we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

Peter Beinart: The Favor Justice Roberts Did the Right

Peter Beinart is editor in chief of Open Zion, a blog about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future at The Daily Beast. He is the author of The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books).It’s easy to see why liberals are relieved today: the most important progressive legislation of most of our lifetimes has survived. It’s easy to see why centrists are relieved: the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has survived. Centrists understand that it’s not a good thing for an ostensibly nonpartisan institution like the Supreme Court to be at war with one of America’s two major parties. John Roberts has made sure that didn’t happen, and as a result, the court’s legitimacy is no longer in free fall.

Lee Byong-Chul: Japan's Nuclear Ambitions Awaken

Lee Byong-Chul is a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul.It would be wrong to say Japan’s experience as the first victim of nuclear weapons in 1945, the year when the United States became the world’s first nuclear power, is a permanent deterrent to its own ambitions for nuclear weapons. It would be also a mistake to assume that the country’s nuclear trauma in the 67-year wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially since the 2011 Fukushima era, has snuffed the government’s interest in weaponization. It is thus disappointing but not surprising that Japan recently altered its basic law on atomic energy to include “national security” among its goals for nuclear power. An Upper House session was quick to revise the main principles of the basic law on nuclear power for the first time in 34 years so as to avoid the neighbors’ watchful gaze. That adds fuel to the fire that the new wording could be a stepping stone to legally permitting the development of atomic weapons in the not-to-distant future. It is hardly the first time that Japan has fumbled the nuclear issue with its neighbors, although Japanese officials in the past have always immediately moved to squash such allegations....

Shahrzad Elghanayan: How Iran Killed Its Future

Shahrzad Elghanayan, a news photo editor, is working on a book about her grandfather.Imagine where the U.S. economy would be today if John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie or any of the magnates who helped turn America into an industrialized society had been gunned down by a revolutionary firing squad. In 1979, that is what happened in Iran to my grandfather, Habib Elghanian, Iran's most prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. My grandfather's execution was not only a personal loss but a turning point for Iran.

Jacques Peretti: Why Our Food is Making Us Fat

Jacques Peretti is a British documentary presenter....The story begins in 1971. Richard Nixon was facing re-election. The Vietnam war was threatening his popularity at home, but just as big an issue with voters was the soaring cost of food. If Nixon was to survive, he needed food prices to go down, and that required getting a very powerful lobby on board – the farmers. Nixon appointed Earl Butz, an academic from the farming heartland of Indiana, to broker a compromise. Butz, an agriculture expert, had a radical plan that would transform the food we eat, and in doing so, the shape of the human race.

Paul Campos: Why Does John Roberts Get to Decide?

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The answers [as to why John Roberts get to decide what kind of health care system we will have] boil down to various forms of cultural mysticism. The conservative form worships The Constitution as a kind of magical and almost — in some cases you can scratch the “almost”– divinely inspired document, similar to the Bible, in that it contains a correct and satisfactory answer to any possible question that can be asked of it.The liberal form venerates judges as pseudo-Platonic philosopher guardians, who protect us from the excesses of democratic decision making via their special brand of wisdom.Both beliefs are or ought to be ridiculous on their face. But such beliefs are psychologically necessary. The alternative is to accept that a K Street lawyer gets to decide what sort of healthcare system America has, for no better reason than that our society, like others, clings to all sorts of irrational customs because of ancestor worship, wishful thinking and sheer inertia.Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform

Daniel Epps: In Health Care Ruling, Roberts Steals a Move From John Marshall's Playbook

Daniel Epps is an associate at King & Spalding LLP in Washington, D.C. and a former law clerk to Justice Kennedy. Earlier today, the Supreme Court, by a narrowly divided vote, upheld the individual mandate, a key component of President Obama's signature piece of legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act....

Shahrzad Elghanayan: How Iran Killed its Future

Shahrzad Elghanayan, a news photo editor, is working on a book about her grandfather. Imagine where the U.S. economy would be today if John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie or any of the magnates who helped turn America into an industrialized society had been gunned down by a revolutionary firing squad. In 1979, that is what happened in Iran to my grandfather, Habib Elghanian, Iran's most prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. My grandfather's execution was not only a personal loss but a turning point for Iran. His execution and the subsequent fleeing of businessmen from Iran contributed to derailing the country's chances of building a modern, diversified, export-based economy, and foreshadowed Iran's neglect of its most valuable resource: its people.

Aaron David Miller: America Hasn’t Had a Great Leader Since 1968

Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His new book, Can America Have Another Great President?, will be published this year. A couple years back, I gave a talk at Princeton on the indispensable role leaders play in successful Arab-Israeli negotiations. A very smart professor from Turkey dismissed my argument as "reductionist," and wondered how I could have missed the broader societal and political forces responsible for success and failure. I simply responded that whatever her views on these matters, she herself hailed from a land in which one guy had fundamentally changed the entire direction of her country's modern history. We left it at that. Shoot me if you want, but I'm a sucker for the great man (and woman) theory of history. Yes, broad social, political, economic, and cultural structural forces shape and constrain what leaders can do. And yes, Marx was right: People make history; but rarely as they please. Indeed, we have a cartoonish view of leadership in which presidents or prime ministers articulate a vision and then through sheer will persuade us to buy it. That's not how it really works. Instead, a leader more often than not intuits and exploits an opportunity when the times or circumstances offer it up. Still, individuals count -- big time.

Amir Taheri: Iraq Is a Beacon of Democracy in Arab World

Amir Taheri writes for various magazines and newspapers about the Middle East, Islamist terrorism and the Iranian regime. At noon, on a building site in Najaf, workers down tools to perform one of the five mandatory prayers of the day. They are a happy lot. For as their foreman explains after the prayer they are constructing what is intended to be the largest Shia Muslim seminary in the world which will take several thousand students. The site is located opposite the golden-domed mausoleum where, according to tradition, lie the mortal remains of Ali Ibn Abitalib, the fourth Caliph of Islam and the first Imam of Shiism. As a result, Najaf is the most sacred city for the world's estimated 300 million Shias. Last year, over 12 million pilgrims visited the Shia shrines along a route that leads from Najaf in the south to Karbala, Baghdad and Samara in the north, making Iraq the top tourist destination in the region. The new seminary is not the only building project in Najaf. In fact the holy city resembles a vast building site where hundreds of projects are taking shape. These include five-star hotels for rich pilgrims and bed-and-breakfast outfits for those with modest purses. There are also shopping malls, restaurants and cafés, not to mention hundreds of housing units across the price range.

William Galston: Conservatives’ Long March Through the Court Hits a Wall

William A. Galston is a contributing editor for The New Republic.In a stunning decision that will define his legacy as chief justice, John Roberts broke with the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc and provided the fifth vote to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act....One can only speculate about Roberts’ motives for proceeding as he did. It is certainly possible that, like Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in the mid-1930s, he had one eye focused on jurisprudence and another on the standing of the institution he heads. This may be another “switch in time” that saved the Court from becoming embroiled in a full-fledged confrontation with the executive and legislative branches....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform

Jonathan H. Adler: Did Conservatives Lose the Battle, but Win the War?

Jonathan H. Adler is a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.It’s unfortunate that Chief Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices to uphold the individual mandate as a tax.  Yet as I understand the ruling, the opinion does very little to enlarge the federal government’s power and, in key respects, reinforced federalism limitations on federal power.  According to SCOTUSBlog, while Chief Justice Roberts concluded the mandate is a tax, he also rejected the Commerce Clause arguments in favor of the mandate.  This is significant, because it will limit the ability of Congress to adopt additional mandates in the future.  No one will be able to claim such requirements are not a tax, and this will make such requirements more difficult to enact....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform

Matthew Cooper: John Roberts, Moderate

Matthew Cooper is Editor of National Journal Daily.The conventional wisdom was shockingly, pathetically wrong.But some folks have long had an inkling that the chief justice was no ideologue.When Roberts was nominated to be chief justice in 2005, a very prominent liberal lawyer told me that he was reassured. Roberts, he noted, was a practicing attorney with years of trials under his belt -- unlike the academic Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas with his slew of government jobs and no real private practice experience. The real world experience of Roberts, this liberal lion thought, would make the Chief -- and the court -- less rigid ideologically....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform

Greg Sargent: SCOTUS Sides with Federal Power

Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog, a reported opinion blog with a liberal slant -- what you might call “opinionated reporting” from the left. He joined the Post in early 2009, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer. He lives in Maryland with his wife, son and daughter....In the broadest possible sense, this can be seen as the start of a third era in which the Court wrestles with questions surrounding the expansion of federal power — each era different from the other, says James O’Hara, a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society.During the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to expand the federal government’s management of the economy to cope with the Great Depression. While the court initially dealt Roosevelt plenty of setbacks, the era as a whole can be seen as a ratification of Roosevelt’s broad contention that the crisis merited expansive federal intervension.During the Warren Court, a liberal era, questions surrounding federal authority were different — and were more directly concerned with the battle between federal power and states’ rights. The Court frequently upheld the federal government’s authority over states on matters ranging from civil rights to voting to education....

Nan Levinson: Mad, Bad, Sad: What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers

Nan Levinson, a Boston-based journalist, reports on civil liberties, politics, and culture. Her next book, War Is Not a Game, is about the recent G.I. antiwar movement.  She is the author of Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, was the U.S. correspondent for Index on Censorship, and teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University."PTSD is going to color everything you write," came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things. That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn't getting much attention, but soon it was pretty much all anyone wrote about. Story upon story about the damage done to our guys in uniform -- drinking, divorce, depression, destitution -- a laundry list of miseries and victimhood. When it comes to veterans, it seems like the only response we can imagine is to feel sorry for them.Victim is one of the two roles we allow our soldiers and veterans (the other is, of course, hero), but most don't have PTSD, and this isn't one of those stories.

John Kay: Rent-Seeking Lessons from Mubarak to Louis XIV

John Kay is a British business economist. We will never know how much Hosni Mubarak might have stolen. One so-called expert has even put the wealth of the deposed president of Egypt and his family at more than $40bn, which would make him one of the world’s richest men, alongside Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Other estimates are much smaller but they still place him among the world’s billionaires. Whatever the true extent of the Mubarak family fortune, it stands in stark contrast to the lot of most Egyptians. Gross domestic product per capita in Egypt is a mere $2,500. In western Europe and North America GDP per capita is about $40,000, yet the capacities of Egypt’s intellectual and entrepreneurial elite are the rival of any state in the world. The real damage imposed by men such as Mr Mubarak is not the money they might have stolen. The tragedy is that the system that enables them to steal it destroys opportunities for others to generate wealth – not only for themselves but for the whole population...

Sergey Markedonov: Russia in the Islamic World

Sergey Markedonov is visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Russia and Eurasia Program, in Washington, DC. Why does Russia so stubbornly support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad? This question is frequently discussed in Western media and political circles. Many American and European analysts consider Moscow’s policy a "phantom of the Cold War" or some kind of dictatorial solidarity. But realism plays a more important role in Moscow’s reasoning than anti-American hostility. For Russia, Syria is a three-dimensional phenomenon. The first two dimensions are better known: Russia, along with China, has a long-running dispute with the West about the relationship between sovereignty and intervention in the domestic political process. That controversy has not been sparked by the current Syrian crisis; instead, it dates back to the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the early 1990s. Secondly, Moscow has economic and geopolitical interests in Syria, ranging from business contracts to Russia’s only naval facility on the Mediterranean Sea in Tartus. The Caucasus Question The third dimension of Russia’s approach to Syria relates to the situation in the North Caucasus, the most problematic region of the country.

Ian Millhiser: Justice Scalia Cites Pro-Slavery Laws Excluding ‘Freed Blacks’ To Justify His Anti-Immigrant Opinion

Ian Millhiser is a Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Editor of ThinkProgress Justice. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Kenyon College and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University.As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion claiming that Arizona’s entire harsh immigration law should be upheld sacrifices both factual and mathematical accuracy in order to attack one of the Obama Administrations recently announced policies. Perhaps the oddest part of Scalia’s dissent, however, is the fact that he actually relied on pro-slavery laws excluding free persons of African descent from much of the south to justify allowing Arizona to target undocumented immigrants:

Anthony McIntyre: By Shaking the Queen's Hand, Martin McGuinness Accepts Her Sovereignty

Dr Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner, writes on Irish history and current affairs. His research for Boston College is now being sought through the US Courts by the British Government. The former Provisional IRA chief of staff Martin McGuinness will shake hands with the British Queen at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast tomorrow. The event has been made possible by the earlier negotiated surrender of the IRA. Surrendering honourably is better than holding out to the last. The leaders of the 1916 rising in Dublin chose to surrender rather than subject the city's population to further bloodshed – in politics as in other areas of life it is often necessary to compromise principles. But there is a gulf between compromise and abandonment that should not be bridged. Otherwise radical ideas and the notion of oppositional currents are devalued. What does it say about the plausibility of the adversarial position if the values espoused in opposition are jettisoned just to make it into office?.. .....