Considering the Supreme Court's current caseload, it's difficult to explain Texas Governor Greg Abbott's rationale for attacking Chief Justice John Roberts.
Governor Abbott launched an attack on Justice Roberts at Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation yesterday where he accused Roberts of being an activist judge who "deserves to be swept up into the political process."
"Chief Justice John Roberts is the tip of the spear in playing politics," Abbott said. "Chief Justice John Roberts knowingly, clearly and unabashedly re-wrote Obamacare twice. What we are seeing is nothing more than naked politics being played by the United States Supreme Court."
Abbott's criticism of Roberts, echoing that of Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, came during a press roundtable at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank where the governor promoted his idea of leading a convention of states to amend the U.S. Constitution to limit the power of the federal government.
This is an astonishing pile of hypocritical shit
You're probably aware that the Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of President Obama's executive orders on immigration, but you may not know how the case landed in front of the Supreme Court to begin with.
The group of Republican state governments led by Texas Governor Abbott who've challenged the president's orders filed their lawsuit in Texas for a very specific reason. They knew that filing the lawsuit in almost any other federal court system would see it thrown out for a lack of standing, but they knew the arch-conservative 5th Circuit Court would side with them. Governor Abbott and his colleagues judge-shopped their lawsuit and filed it in a 'friendly' jurisdiction.
Who is really "playing politics" here?
The last six years in front of the Supreme Court have been dominated by a series of politically-motivated challenges brought by Republicans where they've asked the court to give them political victories.
If Republicans were capable of governing, they could solve all of their perceived problems themselves, but they can't so they've repeatedly asked the court to solve political problems for them. Even though they control both chambers of Congress, they still can't replace Obamacare and they can't pass immigration reform. They can't do jack shit.
You might say Greg Abbott is attempting to 'work the refs' and pressure Chief Justice Roberts into siding with him on the president's executive orders, but he may have picked the worst way to do so.
Justice Roberts has been outspoken against the politicization of the judiciary and the Supreme Court but Governor Abbott says it should be politicized.
You may be a relatively conservative judge, but if you don't side with the Republican party in every single case, no matter how ridiculous that case may be, you will be accused of partisanship and conspiracy.
Let's not forget the second Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare was literally about a single word in a single sentence of the entire Affordable Care Act. 'Rewriting' the law would have meant ruling against the Obama administration and against the clear intent of those who actually wrote the law.