AGONY / David Podvin

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MakeThemAccountable.com

AGONY

By David Podvin

The Associated Press reported on October 5, “New Chief Justice John Roberts stepped forward Wednesday as an aggressive defender of federal authority to block doctor-assisted suicide, as the Supreme Court clashed over an Oregon law that lets doctors help terminally ill patients end their lives.”

Just days after effortlessly conning Democratic senators into confirming him, Roberts has shed all pretense of decency and revealed his true self. While hearing the case of Gonzales v. Oregon, the Chief Justice contradicted his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony by casting aside the disingenuous conservative talking points of original intent and judicial restraint. He strongly aligned with Antonin Scalia and insisted that in deference to right wing ideology the high court must trump the voters’ will.

Mr. Roberts has now made his real agenda so unavoidably clear that even myopic moderate Democrats should be able to see it. Rather than literally interpreting the Constitution, the man whose extremism is no longer stealthy plans to spend his tenure on the high court literally implementing the Republican Party platform.

It is fitting that Roberts’ first oral argument in a major case involves euthanasia because this is the area that best illustrates the self-righteous cruelty of conservatives. Freedom from government interference is theoretically the premise of judicial conservatism, but reactionaries deny that freedom to people whose chronic physical pain has made life unbearable.

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