Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently expressed regret that the court had taken up the case at all, and Stevens said he was "pleased to hear" about O'Connor's shift. The liberal Stevens wrote the dissent in that case.

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The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.

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The Hill reports:

The conservatives were angered by Roberts’s surprise backing of President Obama’s healthcare law last year, and they don't want to see a similar surprise in the two marriage cases the court considered this week.

“I certainly think his credentials were tarnished with the ObamaCare decision,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Does he care about his standing with conservatives? I don’t know.”

Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, agreed, saying that if Roberts doesn't vote with the other conservative justices “on another major issue … then I think the whole understanding of the current makeup of the Supreme Court would be in question."

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Forty-five percent of conservative Republicans say the Supreme Court is liberal, while 39 percent say it's "middle of the road."

On the other side, 48 percent of liberal Democrats view the Roberts Court as conservative, 31 percent say it's middle of the road, and 15 percent say it's liberal.

According to Pew, overall, "A plurality (40%) now say the court is middle of the road, while 24% say it is liberal and about the same share (22%) says it is conservative."

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The Los Angeles Times reports:

Podrasky obtained the highly coveted courtroom seats by emailing Roberts’ sister, Peggy Roberts, and then going through his secretary. Roberts knows she is attending, she said. She, her partner, her sister and her niece will attend Tuesday’s arguments on Proposition 8. On Wednesday, her father will take her niece’s place for the hearing on the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Though Podrasky is ensured of a seat, plenty of people have been lining up for days to get a spot at the highly anticipated hearings - and some have even paid outside help to save their place in line.

From the New York Times:

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But have they? In 2008, Shelby County’s own city of Calera eliminated a black majority district by adding white subdivisions, defeating its only black councilman, until the Justice Department stepped in under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 requires nine states (including Alabama and others mostly in the South) and places in seven other states with past records of discrimination to submit proposed changes to voting practices to the federal government. Calera was required to revise its boundaries to include the black voters it had eliminated and the black councilman was easily reelected. Nevertheless, Shelby County litigators now insist that Section 5 is no longer necessary and claim that Congress acted improperly when it last renewed the act in 2006.

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Now, not far from Selma, Shelby County, Ala., is trying to take the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson hustled through Congress after Bloody Sunday. Even though the act was reauthorized by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2006 on a 98-0 vote in the Senate (it was 390-33 in the House), and signed by President Bush, and even though its constitutionality has been upheld by the Supreme Court four times, there is evidence that the current right-wing court majority would like to overturn at least part of it. Court conservatives once represented a reaction against the court’s supposed overreach into realms best left to Congress, and its willingness to ignore earlier court decisions. Now they seem set to say Congress has no business here, and that their Supreme Court predecessors who upheld the act were either mistaken or the blinkered creatures of their idiosyncratic eras.

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Most observers expect the court to declare those provisions unconstitutional, even though they were extended by the Senate by a unanimous vote less than seven years ago, while facing only token opposition in the House. All in all, 488 of 521 members of Congress voted to renew the pre-clearance provisions.

The enthusiasm with which the court’s righter wing appears to be greeting constitutional attacks on provisions adopted and renewed by overwhelming legislative majorities could make a cynic suspect that “conservative” criticisms of judicial review can often be reduced to the axiom, “the democratic process should be respected, unless it produces a result we really don’t like.”  (Reportedly, during this morning’s oral argument, the increasingly egregious Justice Scalia likened congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”)

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“New England School of Law, Summer Program, Galway, Ireland – teaching stipend: $15,000.”

Another part of the form reveals that the same school reimbursed Roberts for his airfare, meals and lodging for at least the two-week period during which the course -- on the history of the Supreme Court -- was held.  Roberts co-taught the course, which met seven times for two-hour periods, with a law professor, Richard Lazarus.

Roberts and Lazarus taught the same course on the scenic island of Malta last summer, and will do so again amid the charming old world architecture of Prague this July.  (Lazarus did not respond to my request for information regarding what he was being paid to teach the course or how responsibility for teaching and grading it was divided between himself and the chief justice).

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The president, surrounded by family in the ornate White House Blue Room, was administered the oath by Chief Justice John Roberts. With Obama's hand resting on a Bible used for years by Michelle Obama's family, the president vowed "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," echoing the same words spoken by the 43 men who held the office before him.

"I did it," Obama whispered to his youngest daughter, Sasha, as he wrapped her in a hug moments later.

The president said the oath in just minutes before noon on Jan. 20, the time at which the Constitution says new presidential terms begin. There was little pomp and circumstance Sunday - Obama walked into the room flanked by his family and exited almost immediately after finishing the oath.

He'll repeat the swearing-in ritual again Monday on the west front of the Capitol before a crowd of up to 800,000 people.

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Three months after the court upheld President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, the same lineup of justices returns to the bench Monday morning.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberals in sustaining the health care law, drawing liberals' plaudits and conservatives' anger.

This term's big cases seem likely to have Roberts in his more accustomed role of voting with his fellow conservatives and leave Justice Anthony Kennedy with his typically decisive vote in cases that otherwise split the court's liberals and conservatives.

But Roberts will be watched closely for additional signs that he is becoming less ideologically predictable.

A fight over the University of Texas' affirmative action program is the first blockbuster case on the court's calendar, with argument scheduled for Oct. 10. Texas uses multiple factors, including community service, work experience, extracurricular activities, awards and race, to help fill the last 20 to 25 percent of the spots in its freshman classes. The outcome could further limit or even end the use of racial preferences in college admissions.

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Professor John Yoo has told the New York Times that, if the story is true, Roberts has misunderstood his job. “His job is not to finesse the place of the Supreme Court in the political world, in which he and most justices are rank amateurs, but to get the Constitution right first and then defend the institution second.” But this occludes the complexities with which Roberts was faced. New constitutional constructions, of the kind that undergirded the challenge to the mandate, raise deep issues about the appropriate role of the judiciary – issues that go far beyond the healthcare case. Roberts was right to be cautious.

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In response, according to Crawford’s story, the four conservatives then independently crafted a highly unusual joint dissent. If so, this would represent a powerful symbolic gesture: Joint Supreme Court opinions are rare. Normally a justice authors an individual opinion, which other justices may choose to join. Jointly authored opinions are reserved for momentous statements of principle, such as in Cooper v. Aaron, when all nine justices jointly authored an opinion declaring that the court’s anti-segregation decisions were binding on state governments that disagreed with the court’s constitutional interpretations.

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Well, and take that Mitt Romney, who jumped out and accused the president of a $500 billion tax increase on Thursday, the day the ruling game down. An unnamed Romney advisor told the Huffington Post Thursday that the ruling would help Romney as "people realize they just got hit with a massive tax increase." But apparently spending the weekend watching news shows dredge up old footage of Romney insisting the Massachusetts penalty wasn't a tax forced a little bit of intellectual consistency on the campaign. It was great theatre that it came from the same guy who gave us the colorful "Etch-a-Sketch" imagery when describing the way Romney would shake off his right-wing primary season persona and pivot to the sweet, reasonable middle for the general election. After trying to dodge MSNBC's Chuck Todd this morning, Fehrnstrom finally broke down:

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“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose, you know, some of our colleagues would like to get out of being members of the Union. So -- and by that, I mean the United States. So I mean, who can predict what some of the ideologues on their side of aisle will choose,” O’Malley replied.

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Roberts’ decision is not without precedent. Seventy-five years ago, another Justice Roberts – no relation to the current chief justice – made a similar switch. Justice Owen Roberts had voted with the court’s conservative majority in a host of 5-4 decisions invalidating New Deal legislation, but in March of 1937 he suddenly switched sides and began joining with the court’s four liberals.  In popular lore, Roberts’ switch saved the court – not only from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s threat to pack it with justices more amenable to the New Deal but, more important, from the public’s increasing perception of the court as a partisan, political branch of government.

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Has a second “switch in time” saved nine? That’s the unavoidable impression that a reading of the four dissenters’ joint opinion in the PPACA case leaves.  The first “switch in time” also involved a Justice Roberts – Owen Roberts, who in 1937 suddenly switched his vote in a case whose outcome signaled the end of a five-vote majority that was blocking much of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal.

At the time, Roberts’ jurisprudential conversion seemed extremely suspicious to many observers, given that it was announced just a few weeks after FDR had presented legislation proposing an expansion of the Supreme Court to 15 members – a plan attacked by critics as a scheme to “pack the Court” with justices who would uphold New Deal laws. Cynics began referring to Roberts’ sudden change of heart as “the switch in time that saved nine” – that is, that kept the court’s membership at nine justices.

Subsequent historical research suggests that Roberts had already decided to change his vote before FDR announced his plan to expand the court, but we shouldn’t let that detail interfere with the delightful semantic coincidence that it very much looks as if the second Justice Roberts did “switch in time” — at least in part to shield nine justices from the political fallout sure to result from overturning the ACA.

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