WAS SUPREME COURT JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS BLACKMAILED? “It’s time to start asking the question. It’s time to be cynical. It’s time to assume the worst of this government,” Wayne Root writes at The Blaze.

On the other, as Stephen Kruiser notes at the PJ Tatler, “Love Her Or Hate Her, Ann Coulter Warned Us About John Roberts 10 Years Ago.”

WHAT DOES JURASSIC WORLD’S BOX OFFICE DOMINATION MEAN?  Lots and lots more sequels and event blockbusters, that’s what.  That’s not necessarily bad news though.  I loved Fast and Furious 7. I saw the movie on opening night at a multiplex in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  One of my proudest moments as an American was when they dropped multiple cars out of a plane and then opened their parachutes.  The entire crowd gasped and then applauded and laughed.  Same deal when they jumped a sports car through  three different skyscrapers.  America baby!  This is what we do.

I’D LIKE TO SEE MISSISSIPPI DERIVE ITS NEW FLAG from its excellent state quarter. Flowers have been traditional elements on flags, and Mississippi can rightly take pride in its excellent performance in the state quarter competition. To my eye, Mississippi was second only to Connecticut. I know I’m an outsider, but that magnolia image comes from inside the state.

GEORGE WILL: “Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences:

Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court’s complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS’s disregard of the statute’s plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit….

Read the whole thing

YUVAL LEVIN: King v. Burwell and the Law:

Replacing this law with a market-based reform remains as crucial as ever, and should be (and very likely will be) a very high priority for the next Republican presidential nominee. This case accelerated some of the relevant work and internal debates on that front on the Right, but, given how it has been decided, it doesn’t seem likely to change the basic dynamics of the health-care debate looking toward 2016.

But this decision will be more significant than I would have expected a decision for the government to be because of the argument offered up by the Chief Justice. Roberts could have tried to limit the effects of this decision by sticking to a set of fundamentally textual arguments about the meaning of the term “established by the state” in the context of the statute as a whole. The decision does offer such arguments, and Justice Roberts does what he can to minimize their incoherence, to contend with the fact that the words in question seem to have a fairly straightforward meaning, and to offer some responses to Justice Scalia’s devastating critique of the majority’s textual reasoning in his dissent.

But the Chief Justice didn’t leave it at that. He makes a much broader argument about the relationship between the vague, broadly stated aims and purposes of legislators and the role of judges interpreting the meaning of the particular laws those legislators then write. Roberts presses this point most firmly at the end of his decision, writing: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

In effect, this is a version of the president’s argument: Obamacare is not so much a particular law as an overarching desire “to improve health insurance markets” and so if at all possible it should be taken to mean whatever one believes would be involved in doing so. From the beginning of its implementation of this statute, that Obama administration has treated the words of the statute as far less relevant than the general aim of doing what it thinks would improve health insurance markets, and today the Supreme Court essentially endorsed this way of understanding the law and suggested it is how judges should think about laws more generally too.

This understanding of the role of the judge threatens to undermine the rule of law in the American system of government, because it undermines the central place assigned to written law, and to the legislator, in that system. Ironically, I think the Chief Justice intends his decision to be deferential to the Congress—to keep the Court’s footprint small in this arena by not reading laws in ways that require large transformations in the forms of their administration. But in effect, this is more contempt than deference. While it would seem to suggest that the will of the legislator should guide the system, in fact it means that the word of the legislator does not govern the other branches. It implies that Congress should have just passed a law that said “health insurance markets shall be improved,” and then left it to the executive agencies to decide how they wish to do that while judges nod in approval.

Thus does a commitment to “judicial restraint” and “deference” in practice morph into “activism” and “legislating from the bench.” Instead, justices should be selected because of their demonstrated commitment to enforcing both the Constitution and statutes as they are written, whether this leads to upholding or invalidating a law or regulation.

HOW TWITTER UPENDED THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMEDIANS AND AUDIENCES. “Twitter’s outrage mobs have always reminded me a bit of puritanical scolds: They sniff out heresies and denounce the heterodox, rejecting the defense that artists must have license to transgress the sensibilities of those claiming offense,” Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Post: 

“If it doesn’t get laughs, you’re not gonna get work, and you’re not gonna be a comedian,” Seinfeld replies. “So the audience ultimately decides. It’s a very democratic system.”

Seinfeld’s point is an interesting one in this context. The scolds will often claim that their censoriousness is simply an artifact of the marketplace at work. But this is misdirection. The aggrieved don’t leverage their power by unfollowing an offensive person or refusing to watch their routine. When Metzger defended a fellow comic whose routine was reviled by the social justice set, his newfound foes did not say they’d skip his stand-up act and force clubs to choose between a guy who could fill a room and a guy who can’t. Rather, they combed through his Facebook history before calling for him to be fired from “Inside Amy Schumer.”

As Metzger tells Maron, Schumer and Comedy Central ignored such pleas. Similarly, Comedy Central and Jon Stewart dismissed the denunciations of Trevor Noah when it was revealed he made a few questionable jokes about Jews and girls with tattoos. And here’s where we can see how to balance the rights of comedians to crack jokes with the rights of the perpetually outraged to vent their anger. You are allowed to participate with a comedian and his employer on Twitter in ways that you aren’t allowed to at the Improv. But the employers of these comedians are, similarly, allowed to ignore you.

Speaking as a fan of comedy? I hope they do.

But CEOs and bakery owners will always be fair game for the “burn the heretic” outrage mobs.

BILL DE BLASIO’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEEK.

WHITEWASHING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S RACIST HISTORY.

AS A WISE MAN ONCE SAID, PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: “Donald Trump’s Neil Young Counterpunch Personifies His Appeal.”

40-YEAR-OLD MEAT, sold to consumers in China.

NEXT UP: CARLY VS. HILLARY ON PAY PER VIEW?  “Forget Mayweather vs. Pacquiao. I’d pay big money to see Carly go mano-a-mano with the Great Email Eraser,” Roger Simon writes.

YOUR NIGHTLY DOSE OF “INSOMNIA THEATER”: ‘MY COLLEGE HAD A PROBLEM WITH A FUNNY SHIRT’– Check out this video about Ohio University student Isaac Smith’s successful lawsuit against OU after the university banned his organization’s t-shirts. Isaac’s lawsuit was another successful installment of FIRE’s ongoing Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project.

JOSH BLACKMAN IN USA TODAY: Roberts rewrites Obamacare, again

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

No matter how low your opinion of Washington DC, it's nothing compared to Washington DC's low opinion of you.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 25, 2015

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Britain Realizing Full Extent of Muslim Rape-Gang Problem.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS? The Background of a lynching.

BYPASSING SEPARATION OF POWERS TO “FIX” SLOPPY LAWS:  My SCOTUSblog take (with co-author David Rivkin) on the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell decision.

In King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court surprised many Court watchers, ruling six to three that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits individuals who buy health insurance on the federal exchange to receive taxpayer subsidies. The decision represents a decisive victory for ACA supporters, and an equally decisive loss for the rule of law.  With King, the Supreme Court has signaled (again) that it is willing to “save” important laws by rewriting them, thus behaving as an all-powerful, unelected, politically insulated, unconstitutional Council of Revision. . . .

[B]y departing from the “natural reading” of a law that is patently poorly drafted, the Court has short-circuited the entire political process.  When judges take it upon themselves to “fix” broken legislation like the ACA, they diminish political accountability by encouraging Congress to be sloppy when drafting legislation. And when it comes to the quality of legislating, judicially drafted “legislation” is always worse than even hastily drafted congressional statutes.

Moreover, when faced with a poorly drafted law, the executive branch has every incentive to amend laws unilaterally, rather than working with Congress to amend them.  It may be expedient for presidents to issue regulations pretending legislation says whatever the president wants it to say, but such de facto executive-lawmaking inherently lacks the deliberation and compromise that permeates the legislative process.

The Court’s decision in King is a disaster for the rule of law, particularly the separation of powers. One can only hope its sloppy reasoning is a “one off,” designed specifically to save (again) the ACA, that won’t be extended to other situations. Otherwise, the current Roberts Court is signaling that it thinks it has free constitutional reign to use inchoate “contextual” reasoning to bypass plain statutory text.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Apple Removes History Games with Confederate Flags.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: “Police withheld bombshell report revealing how gangs of Muslim men were grooming more than 100 schoolgirls as young as 13 in case it inflamed racial tensions ahead of General Election,” according to the London Daily Mail today.

REPORT: “Darin LaHood Campaign Uses Literal Strong-arm Tactics: Manager Assaults Debate Moderator, Charges Filed,” David Steinberg writes at PJM.

FOX NEWS DROPS BOB BECKEL:

Fox News has officially dropped “The Five” co-host Bob Beckel from the network, saying the show could no longer be held “hostage” to his personal issues.

“We tried to work with Bob for months, but we couldn’t hold The Five hostage to one man’s personal issues,” Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming, said in a statement. “He took tremendous advantage of our generosity, empathy and goodwill and we simply came to the end of the road with him.”

Shine said Fox News personalities Juan Williams and Geraldo Rivera will be “among those rotating on the show for the near future.”

Beckel, who joined the network in 2000, had entered rehab therapy for his addiction to prescription pain medication in April. His last appearance on the network was Feb. 16, more than four months ago.

According to Zev Chafets 2013 biography, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, Beckel was still with CNN in 2000:

In 2002, Beckel was caught up in an extortion attempt by a prostitute. He says that he wasn’t involved with her, and he had been part of a police sting. In any case, he gave her a check with his signature on it, a surpassingly naïve thing for a celebrity to do, even as a favor to the cops. The incident made headlines and CNN dropped him. “I went from making $ 750,000 a year to working at the Government Printing Office for thirteen bucks an hour, that’s how screwed I was,” he says.

Ailes saved him with a job offer.

Ailes knew of Beckel since 1984, when Beckel repurposed Wendy’s “Where the Beef” ad as a campaign slogan for Democrat Walter Mondale, and Ailes was a campaign consultant for first Reagan’s reelection, then George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. “But managing the Democratic catastrophe of 1984 wasn’t really much of a credential,” Chafets noted. “Beckel, who is funny and brash, was a better television performer than a political operator; he was scooped up as a talking head by various shows and caught on as a full-time commentator at CNN.” When Beckel eventually joined Fox, first as a guest-contributor in 2004, he told Chafets:

“You have to go pretty far to the left to be farther than I am,” says Beckel. “I got shit from all my liberal friends. At one point, some of them actually staged an intervention.”

It didn’t snap him out of it. Beckel stayed at Fox, but he continued to be active in the Democratic Party. One night he was sitting in the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel when two young men, delegates to the Young Democrats convention, came over and began berating him. “Roger Ailes is worse than fucking Hitler,” one of them said.

“I lost it and put them both on the floor,” says Beckel. “I was embarrassed about this. Shit, I did it sober.”

The story got around Washington and made it to New York. Ailes sent Beckel a giant gift basket with a note: “Thank you for being loyal.”

Which helps to explain how the crude, explosive arch-leftist, a recovering alcoholic and cocaine user lasted as long as he did on Fox.

UPDATE: Only one man can replace Beckel: Anthony Weiner is that man — and he wants the gig.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Let’s recall why the Affordable Care Act is so messed up.

PREFERENCE CASCADE: Republican Nikki Haley’s decision to call on the the South Carolina legislature “to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds in Columbia,” James Taranto writes, “appears to have set off a ‘preference cascade,’ a concept the Tennessee legal scholar Glenn Reynolds discussed in a 2002 essay about the post-9/11 outpouring of patriotism, including displays of the American flag.”

In his latest “Best of the Web Today” column in the Wall Street Journal, Taranto quotes the following passage from our Insta-Host. (Registration at the Journal may be required, if my Google pass-through link doesn’t work):

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. . . . Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it—but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers—or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

Taranto adds:

After Tucson, the left tried to incite a moral panic over incendiary conservative speech. Even President Obama didn’t go along with that. After Newtown, they made a push for gun control. They won some victories in states where Democrats held legislative power—Colorado, Connecticut, New York—but lost elsewhere, including in Washington. The anti-Confederate preference cascade results not from the power of the left but from the newly revealed powerlessness of those in the South with an attachment to Confederate symbolism.

And it’s not clear that the politics here redound to the advantage of the left, or the Democratic Party. Southern states’ abandonment of Confederate symbolism seems likely to ease racial polarization, and a less polarized political climate may pose a challenge to Democratic efforts to encourage black voter turnout and keep Republicans on the moral defensive.

Read the whole thing.

‘WE SHOULD START CALLING THIS LAW SCOTUSCARE,’ and 20 Other Epic Scalia Burns. Now with extra helpings of “pure applesauce” and “interpretive jiggery-pokery!”