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" SEE ALL THE 2012 AMERICANS OF THE YEAR AND COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR NEW POSTS BY CHARLES P. PIERCE Published in the December 2012 issue Barring a catastrophic health event, some kind of personal scandal that seems unimaginable, or a sudden desire to become a beachcombing wastrel on a Polynesian island, John Roberts is going to be the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court for a very long time. He is fifty-seven years old. That means, all things being equal, Roberts could easily surpass the record tenure of John Marshall, who presided over the court for thirty-four years and died in office. It should be no surprise, then, that when tasked to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Roberts&amp;#039;s knees declined to jerk. He didn&amp;#039;t want to march into history with two dead elephants on his court&amp;#039;s back. Prior to the decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the best-known decision produced by the Roberts court was in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which blew up a century&amp;#039;s worth of campaign-finance law, enshrined in law the principle that corporations are people and that money is speech, and legalized political corruption for the foreseeable future. Roberts had to know that striking down a Democratic president&amp;#039;s signature achievement after having struck down any barriers to unlimited corporate cash in our elections would mark his court lousy with partisanship for the rest of his tenure, which, as we said, is going to be a long one. Given that, and with the court still laboring under the long shadow of Bush v. Gore, it seems that Roberts was looking for a way to decide the case that would preserve the court&amp;#039;s institutional integrity. He found one. Roberts upheld the law under the taxing power of the Congress, and not under its power to regulate commerce, a distinction that may become more important than the decision itself. He always has been dubious of the expansion of the Commerce Clause that had been undertaken throughout the last century, especially during the New Deal. So with this opinion he managed simultaneously to save the court&amp;#039;s credibility while also staying faithful to the corporate power to which he has shown deference his entire career. No one saw this coming or had reason to believe that John Roberts was even capable of such nimbleness. But on that day, June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States truly became the Roberts court. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16694/john-roberts-american-of-the-year-1212/>