In the tortured justification for his vote to sustain Obamacare last summer, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to Congress’s authority to levy taxes — an argument not even put forward by its advocates. (They, in fact, had argued that it was not a tax.) As a direct result of Roberts’s folly, the stark reality of Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America” creeps closer each day.
Will Roberts do it again? As I write this, the High Court is hearing oral arguments for and against California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as a union of a man and a woman, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which gives states the right to refuse recognition of same-sex “marriages” performed in other states. DOMA was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by then President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Based on what I’m hearing from the justices — John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy in particular — I am not optimistic for the future of marriage in our nation.
Arguably, America’s slide into the morass of progressivism began a century ago when Teddy Roosevelt, dissatisfied with his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, decided to make a comeback in 1912 as an independent candidate for president. In so doing, TR helped to usher in the dark days of Woodrow Wilson and to pave the way for cousin Franklin D. and his “New Deal.”
Doug Patton was s a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and policy advisor to conservative candidates, elected officials and public policy organizations.