Yesterday, Chief Justice Roberts embraced a ludicrous, Tea Party reading of the two key provisions of the Constitution, tossing out nearly two centuries of established law in the process. Yet, after he also refused to join a deeply partisan decision tossing out President Obama’s signature accomplishment — agreeing with several leading conservative judges in the process — the right-wing did not waste any time drawing its knives upon him. In just 24 hours, he was accused of everything from caving to non-existent “bullying” to being mentally unfit for duty.

It’s tough to imagine a more flagrant display of ungratefulness than the pushback Roberts is now receiving from his fellow conservatives. The reality is that Roberts consistently advanced the right’s agenda from the moment he joined the Court:

1) Corporate Money In Elections: Roberts jonied the majority in Citizens United, holding that wealthy corporations should have a nearly unlimited power to buy and sell American elections. Roberts also voted to undermine public financing laws in a way that severely undermines candidates without well-moneyed backers’ ability to compete in elections.

2) Judges For Sale: Roberts wrote a dissent in Caperton v. Massey that would have allowed a wealthy coal CEO to pay $3 million to put a sympathetic supreme court justice on that court. The same justice would then go on to $50 million verdict against the big spender’s company.

3) Corporate-Owned Courts: Roberts consistently votes to give corporations a nearly unlimited power to force workers and consumers into a privatized, corporate-run arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporations.

4) Dividing And Conquering Ordinary Americans: Roberts voted in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion to allow corporations to strip their workers and consumers of their ability to bring class action lawsuits. Because of this decision, corporations now have a nearly unlimited power to cheat the people who do business with them — so long as they only do it a few dollars at a time.

5) Corporate Immunity To The Law: Roberts voted to give generic drug makers immunity to key state laws after one of their drugs caused a condition called tardive dyskinesia in many of the people who took it. Tardive dyskinesia is an horrific neurological condition that causes sometimes crippling, uncontrollable bodily movements, often in the face:

6) Abortion: Roberts also joined the Court’s decision restricting reproductive freedom in Gonzales v. Carhart, which reasoned that a woman’s right to choose must be cut back because “it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”

7) Race: Roberts has also consistently resisted attempts to eradicate the legacy of racism in America. Most notably, in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, he claimed that a plan to desegregate public schools violates Brown v. Board of Education.

8) Gitimo: Roberts twice sided with President George W. Bush on questions of detainee treatment — as a lower court judge in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and as Chief Justice in Boumediene v. Bush.

9) Unequal Pay For Women: Roberts joined the Court’s discredited decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire rolling back women’s right to receive equal pay for equal work.

10) Older Workers: Roberts also joined the Court’s 5-4 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services limiting older workers’ ability to be free from age discrimination in the workplace.

At Lackland Airforce Base in Texas, investigators are looking into an escalating sex scandal, including wrongdoing from improper sexual relations to rape. So far, the Air Force has identified 31 victims and filed charges against six instructors. Most of the misconduct has occurred during basic training.

The Air Force is trying to determine whether there are “systematic issues” with boot camp at Lackland that contribute to sexual misconduct:

The Air Force investigation centers on a unit of boot-camp instructors at Lackland, near San Antonio, where 36,000 recruits undergo basic training each year.

About one-quarter of the instructors in the 331st Training Squadron have either been charged with crimes or are under investigation for sexual misconduct. One trainer has been charged with raping or sexually assaulting 10 recruits.

Senior Air Force officials said they have found problems in other units as well, prompting them to open multiple investigations to determine the extent to which female recruits face harassment and whether the Air Force’s selection process for male instructors is fundamentally flawed.

Across the military, the number of sexual assault complaints were up 1% in 2011, from 3,158 to 3,192. However, the Defense Department believes that sexual assault is vastly underreported, and estimates that there may be more than 19,000 incidents every year.

Advocacy groups believe that one of the biggest obstacles to reducing sexual assault is a culture of silence, and that basic training, is a “target-rich environment for sexual predators.” Only 11% of basic training instructors are female.

The investigation comes at a time when the military is taking steps to fight sexual abuse. In April, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced several new policies designed to reduce sexual misconduct, including having complaints be handled by senior officers, setting up special units to interview victims and collect evidence, and briefing recruits on sexual-assault policies.

–Alex Brown

Yesterday was a day for celebration because when millions of Americans learn that their lives are no longer endangered by a renegade Supreme Court, everything else is details. Nevertheless, it is important to be aware of just how close the country came to the brink of disaster yesterday. Four justices, including so-called moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy, joined a dissent that did not simply toss out two-hundred years of established law, it also called for the entire law to be repealed.

This too was a massive departure from longstanding law. A court may not invalidate any constitutional part of a law unless it is “evident” that Congress would have preferred that part to fall along with the parts the court just invalidated, yet Kennedy and his three co-ideologues would simply cast that rule aside in order to achieve the Republican Party’s number one policy goal.

And the Kennedy Four do not stop there. As part of a lengthy conclusion warning that enabling democratically elected lawmakers to actual govern places “liberty at peril,” the dissenters write what may be the least self-aware paragraph ever composed by a Supreme Court justice:

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.

Caution and minimalism are indeed important values for a judge to possess. But tossing out an entire landmark statute because you object to a few lines is the opposite of minimalism, and taking such a maximalist approach without even pausing to consider the consequences is the opposite of caution.

Had just one more justice joined the Kennedy Four’s opinion, Medicare would have likely shut down. Approximately 100 million Medicare claims are processed each month using a formula that was altered by the Affordable Care Act. If the entire law were tossed, new rates could not be calculated under the old, pre-ACA formula until after a rulemaking process that can take months to complete. The result would be that Medicare would not be able to pay doctors for what could be many months, and because Medicare’s computers are not equipped to handle this kind of backlog, Medicare’s systems would likely crash.

This, by the way, is just one of the many consequences that would have likely occurred immediately if Justice Kennedy had prevailed yesterday. Four justices — almost a majority of the Supreme Court — announced yesterday that they would happily blow up our entire health care system simply to lash out at President Obama’s signature accomplishment, forcing millions of Americans to face uncertainty, financial ruin or potentially even death after they suddenly lose their ability to access affordable health care.

Nor is this kind of behavior out of character for Justice Kennedy. Kennedy was the driving force behind Citizens United, even after Roberts initially advocated a less radical approach. Kennedy is a zealous supporter of forced arbitration decisions enabling corporations to force people into a corporate-run court system. He cast the key vote against Lilly Ledbetter and against equal pay for women in the workplace. And, of course, he voted to install George W. Bush as president.

To be clear, Kennedy is not Clarence Thomas. He proved that in Monday’s immigration decision. But the health care dissent shows he is no less willing to take America to the edge of an abyss than the Court’s most radical members. If five colleagues had not been their to stop him, he would have pushed us in.

Chief Justice John Roberts — a George W. Bush appointee — surprised many conservatives when he wrote the majority opinion upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate, but now some conservative activists are trying to link the side effects of Roberts’ epilepsy medication to his jurisprudence.

On his radio show yesterday, right-wing host Michael Savage — who has previously called autism a “phony disease” — claimed that Roberts’ epilepsy is the root cause of his “cognitive dissociation” in the Obamacare ruling:

Let’s talk about Roberts. I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It’s well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts’ writings you can see the cognitive dissociation in what he is saying.

Listen:

Another right-wing radio host, Bryan Fischer, echoed Savage’s sentiments in a tweet citing a 2007 New York Times piece about the Chief Justice.

NYT, ’07: Roberts’ epilepsy meds “troubling side effects,” include “mental slowing and forgetfulness.”nyti.ms/LU0dgv

— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) June 29, 2012

In true form, the Drudge Report also linked to Savage’s comments in the wake of the ruling.

It’s remarkable that epilepsy is somehow still stigmatized significantly more than other neurological disorders. It’s even more remarkable that Savage, Fischer, and Drudge would stoop this low.

– Steven Perlberg

On Sunday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) doubled down on a right wing conspiracy theory that the failed “Fast and Furious” operation was a secret scheme by Democrats designed to promote stronger gun control regulation — but also conceded he had absolutely no evidence to back the theory and likely never would.

Now, Issa has been called out for this allegation in an unlikely quarter: the conservative National Review. In an editorial Wednesday, the magazine’s deputy managing editor Robert VerBruggen took the California Republican to task:

Fast and Furious is a horrific scandal. The public deserves answers as to who devised the operation and what they hoped to accomplish. But the theory that Fast and Furious was devised to promote gun control goes far beyond the evidence, as Issa basically admitted to ABC this weekend, and it does not withstand scrutiny. The chairman should be ashamed to have dabbled in it, and should fully retract his initial comment, unless he has a considerable amount of evidence he has not shared with the public.

But Issa, as the editorial highlights, admitted that he has no such evidence. While he claimed to have emails hoping to use the failure as evidence of the need for greater supervision of guns, he outright said “So, chicken or egg? We don’t know which came first, we probably never will.”

VerBruggen concludes that “Unless far more evidence surfaces to support it, we should put this theory to rest.” And even Issa acknowledges that that isn’t likely to happen.