ZadekpediaJohn Roberts is discussed across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the Supreme Court justice most closely associated with the doctrine of judicial deference. Guests and host return repeatedly to his 2012 vote upholding the healthcare law, treating it as the central test of whether a conservative Chief Justice will restrain himself even when he dislikes the outcome.
Judicial deference defined
In a 2020 episode, Josh Blackman set out the concept that frames every later discussion of Roberts. The elected branches are accountable, he said, while the justices of the Supreme Court are not elected, serve for life, and have life tenure; the preference is therefore that the elected branches make tough decisions and not the unelected branch Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020). Blackman traced the model of deference to the New Deal, when the idea was that courts should not decide these issues, and dated the turn away from it to the 1950s and 1960s, when the court began creating exceptions and second-guessing the legislature. Bob Zadek pressed him on the word “screwed up,” asking whether it meant a bad policy decision or legislation that oversteps constitutional bounds; Blackman agreed it meant a clear violation of the Constitution, adding that where the Constitution does not give clear guidance, that itself means the elected branches can decide.
The 2012 healthcare ruling
Damon Root, in a 2014 episode, described Roberts casting the deciding vote to uphold the healthcare law, the Obamacare law, and calling it an act of judicial restraint. Root quoted Roberts saying it was not the court’s job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices, and argued that Roberts did not necessarily like the healthcare law but felt his role was to defer to Congress and the president Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014). Root noted the surprise this caused — a conservative Chief Justice appointed by George W. Bush, with Republican Party associations, saving President Obama’s key law — and said most conservatives and libertarians think he got it wrong.
Bob Zadek returned to the same case in 2016, saying Roberts famously said in the NFIB v. Sebelius case that it was not his job to rethink legislation, and that if you don’t like what your legislators are doing, the political process is to vote them out Ilya Shapiro on the Supreme Court in the Balance (2016). Zadek read this as profound judicial deference in one sentence, despite Roberts having his own doubts about whether the statute was constitutional.
Restraint or selective conservatism
David Kaplan, in a 2019 episode, offered the sharpest dissent from the deferential reading. He said Roberts showed in the first Obamacare ruling in 2012 that he knew what judicial restraint correctly applied looked like, but that he has not been restrained in his vote in any number of areas — striking down campaign finance regulation, gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019). Kaplan called him a true conservative and warned against mistaking him for a middle-of-the-roader, while arguing that this Chief Justice, now constituting what passes for the middle of the Court as the swing justice after Justice Kennedy retired, understands that the Court’s prestige and therein its power matters more than any particular vote. Kaplan also noted that Obamacare clearly is constitutional and that those arguing otherwise barely present plausible arguments.
Across episodes
The same question — whether Roberts’s deference is principled or selective — is argued in more than one episode, and the treatment shifts. In 2014 Damon Root presented the 2012 vote as deference applied even against the justice’s own preferences; in 2016 Bob Zadek read the same ruling as a one-sentence demonstration of profound deference; in 2019 David Kaplan accepted that Roberts knew what restraint looked like but argued his record elsewhere — campaign finance, the Voting Rights Act — shows a true conservative rather than a moderate. The 2020 episode supplies the doctrinal vocabulary for the dispute but does not itself address Roberts.