re: Chief Justice John Roberts...You are now irrelevant

Shannon Bream on Fox News made an interesting point about Roberts last night. The addition of ACB to the Court may actually result in Roberts siding with the conservatives more than he would have before RGB passed. With ACB there, he can no longer be a swing vote in most cases where the vote is split along conservative/liberal lines. With his ability to be a swing vote gone, there is still a way that he can sort of have his say in the Court’s opinions: if he is in the majority, he gets to choose who writes the opinion for the majority. Thus, in the big, controversial cases he would be able to assign the opinion writing responsibility to himself. Writing the opinion in these cases gives him a lot of power to his interpret things as narrowly or as broadly as he wants, as long as he stay with the overall decision of the majority as to whether something is constitutional/unconstitutional. Now, his ability to do this would be somewhat limited because he would still need to get a majority of the justices to sign on to his opinion.