Roberts Saves Health Law and Maybe Obama’s Job

President Obama and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., have never had a particularly good relationship. In September 2005, when then-senator Barack Obama of Illinois cast one of 22 votes against Roberts’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, he complained that the conservative lawyer and jurist “far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” Five years later, Roberts fumed that Obama had turned a State of the Union address into a political “pep rally” by lambasting him and other members of the court for a controversial ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate campaign giving.