Here’s the link to my op-ed column today in the Greensboro, North Carolina News and Record N&R Op-Ed on Chief Justice John Roberts’ crucial vote on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). With many on the Right howling 
about Roberts betraying the conservative cause, I thought it important to point out to my fellow swing-state voters here in the Tar Heel state that properly understood, conservatism — and especially legal conservatism — has always rejected the concept of party lines and ideological “correctness.” Discussing Roberts’ ACA vote with a former law professor of mine who has strong ties to the legal conservative movement, I was reminded that some of Roberts’ prior votes have indeed reflected typical conservative party-line thinking. But that, to my mind, is the point — and value — of his ACA vote. It shows the Chief Justice as intellectually inclined to judge each case on the merits and within its own context. The modern conservative movement, as represented by thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and even Ayn Rand, were adamantly opposed to ideology as a concept. They viewed it as a limiting, almost inhumane philosophical mindset that had much more in common with totalitarian, single party rule politics than with the deliberative democracy of the Anglo-American tradition. (Something Edmund Burke was writing a couple of hundred years ago regarding the revolution in France.) This shared conservative tradition is rooted in the principles of rhetoric, debate, and the exchange of ideas which formed the foundation of the ancient Greek and Roman democracies from which our culture emerged.
The reflective, creative, deliberative conservatism that Roberts represents is dwindling. As Judge Richard Posner — a powerful force in the conservative legal community — recently told NPR, “these conservatives who are blasting Roberts are making a very serious mistake.”
I thoroughly concur.
