My take on the Chief Justice’s motivations in Williams-Yulee is that he’s come around to the position that judicial elections are different, and the First Amendment balance may be struck differently. But maybe I’m naive.
Noah Feldman sees a deeper motivation: “The ultimate irony of Wednesday’s opinion is that it shows Roberts as a consummate politician, manipulating the constitutional doctrine to produce a result that will achieve his political goal of insisting that judges aren’t political.”
And one of my readers (from the far right) writes: “This is only going to increase speculation since the ACA ruling, that the Chief Justice is being blackmailed somehow. I suspect it might cause some planned litigation to be slow-walked, to see if the trend of him voting with the liberal members is going to continue, and conservatives have lost their majority.” When I wrote that this sounded a bit paranoid, my reader responded:
Given what we now know about the extent of NSA and other agency spying on Americans, the line between paranoia and well grounded suspicion is getting kind of vague… And the IRS has made it kind of difficult to blow off the notion of a government agency making itself into a political weapon. Roberts’ ACA ruling really came out of the blue, so far as my side was concerned. Nobody trusted Kennedy, but Roberts? Who expected him to start making off the wall excuses to uphold an unpopular liberal law?