Emails from Wikileaks reveal how Democrats got Chief Roberts to fold on Obamacare. He wasn’t blackmailed, he wasn’t threatened. He was just… persuaded.
This week’s leaks show Hillary Clinton ally Neera Tanden laying out a strategy to intimidate the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare.
Ms. Tanden runs the Center for American Progress, the think tank that is essentially an arm of the Clinton campaign. CAP’s former chief, John Podesta, is now the Clinton campaign chairman, and on June 2, 2015 Ms. Tanden sent an email to Jake Sullivan, a key Clinton aide, copying Mr. Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, another campaign operative.
…Ms. Tanden wrote that, “As Jennifer will remember, it was pretty critical that the President threw the gauntlet down last time on the Court, warning them in the first case that it would politicize the role of the Court for them to rule against the ACA. As a close reader of the case, I honestly believe that was vital to scaring Roberts off.”
There was a lot of speculation from people who know Roberts that he was simply trying to keep the court from being “politicized” and giving in on Obamacare was how to do that. It looks like liberals zeroed in on that concern and pressured him on it:
“I’m not arguing that Hillary spend a lot of time attacking the Court,” she writes. “I do think it would be very helpful to all of our interest in a decision affirming the law, for [Chief Justice] Roberts and perhaps [Justice Anthony] Kennedy to see negative political consequences to ruling against the government. Therefore, I think it would be helpful to have a story of how progressives and Hillary would make the Supreme Court an election issue (which would be a ready argument for liberals) if the Court rules against the government.”
Wikileaks promises us incredible conspiracies being exposed, but it’s actually just shown us how simple and mundane politics is. In this case, all they needed to do was find Roberts’ pressure point and press on it until he broke.