Swopa:
Late Night: Crybaby Conservatism on the Supreme Court: [T]he stream of accusations from conservatives that Chief Justice Roberts buckled under pressure from liberals to reverse his intended vote. What liberals, you ask? Well, this is the fun part. I surveyed the literature on this subject, such as it is, and the complaints consistently cite only two examples: a speech in the Senate by Patrick Leahy of Vermont in mid-May, and an article in the New Republic by Jeffrey Rosen two weeks earlier.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we really rolled out the big guns on this one…
So, given that this is hardly the kind of withering assault that the right-wingers are painting it as, what’s really going on? If you guessed that the general rule about conservative projection — that they invariably accuse the left of exactly what they’re doing themselves — applies here, you’re probably right. The much-hyped liberal “pressure” cited above was easily outshouted by the conservative echo chamber complaining about it (in the National Review, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, multiple columnists on the Washington Post op-ed pages, and so on)… all of this whining… in the week around Memorial Day. It’s quite plausible that, as Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times suggests, key conservatives (apparently including Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review) were tipped off… and so they decided to fire up the mighty Wurlitzer in a last-ditch effort to pressure Roberts themselves.
But apparently, that’s nothing compared to what was going on inside the Court itself…. [I]t’s not hard to figure that part of their pressure campaign was leaking to GOP-friendly media that Obamacare might survive — and, in classic right-wing fashion, attempting to accuse their opponents of improperly influencing the vote...
