WASHINGTON (AP) – The chief justice who once mangled President Barack Obama’s oath of office has once again helped rescue the president’s signature achievement, his health care law.
After an awkward first encounter, these two Harvard Law graduates who rose to high positions of power from opposite ends of the political spectrum are bound together in the legacy of a law that the president says has now been “woven into the fabric of America” and that Roberts may not even personally support.
It was Roberts who wrote the majority opinion in Thursday’s 6-3 ruling that preserved a critical element of the health care law. And it was Roberts who provided the critical vote to uphold the legal underpinnings of the Affordable Care Act in a 5-4 ruling in 2012.
“This will be a part of them both,” predicted Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, the constitutional scholar who once had Roberts as a student and later hired Obama as a research assistant.
Tribe, a supporter of the health care law, called it a kind of “kismet” that didn’t have to happen that way.