This is getting ridiculous. John Roberts appears to be a one man constitutional wrecking crew.

Salon:

This weekend CBS News' Jan Crawford reported that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote in regard to upholding the bulk of the Affordable Care Act. Crawford reports that Roberts voted with the rest of the court's conservatives to strike down the individual mandate, but in the course of drafting his opinion changed his mind, and ended up siding with the court's four liberals to uphold almost all of the law.

In response, according to Crawford's story, the four conservatives then independently crafted a highly unusual joint dissent. If so, this would represent a powerful symbolic gesture: Joint Supreme Court opinions are rare. Normally a justice authors an individual opinion, which other justices may choose to join. Jointly authored opinions are reserved for momentous statements of principle, such as in Cooper v. Aaron, when all nine justices jointly authored an opinion declaring that the court's anti-segregation decisions were binding on state governments that disagreed with the court's constitutional interpretations.

It's notable that Crawford's sources insist on the claim that the joint dissent was authored specifically in response to Roberts' majority opinion, without any participation from him at any point in the drafting process that created it. It would, after all, be fairly preposterous for the four dissenters to jointly "author" an opinion that was in large part written originally by the author of the majority opinion to which the joint dissenters were now so flamboyantly objecting.

Yet that, I am told by a source within the court with direct knowledge of the drafting process, is exactly what happened. My source insists that "most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts' chambers in April and May." Only the last portion of what eventually became the joint dissent was drafted without any participation by the chief justice.

Read the rest of the article. It makes perfect sense - or, at least it explains what many legal experts were commenting on at the time. The dissent didn't mention Roberts' decision for the first three quarters of the ruling - an unprecedented occurrence.

I don't know if this is true. But if it is, Roberts has accomplished exactly the opposite of what he set out to do when he voted the way he did; he has destroyed the integrity of the court.