The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday morning to uphold a key provision of the Affordable Care Act has infuriated Republicans, many of whom refuse to accept that Obamacare is here to stay. But one conservative writer is in such disbelief as to suspect a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts write a majority opinion that sided with the court’s four liberal justices?
At Glenn Beck's The Blaze, Wayne Root writes, “It’s time to start asking the question. It’s time to be cynical. It’s time to assume the worst of this government. Has Supreme Court Justice John Roberts been blackmailed or intimidated?” Root continues:
“I think the Obama Crime Family meets with a key politician like Boehner or Justice Roberts and they offer both a carrot and stick. They threaten to expose something terrible like an affair, or corruption, or malfeasance, or immorality that would shock the nation, ruin their career, destroy their legacy, cost their marriage, destroy their relationship with their children and leave them unemployable by any respectable law firm or lobbyist.”
Root never gets into specifics—but others on the fringe right have done so. In 2013, about a year after the Supreme Court upheld the ACA's individual mandate—Roberts also wrote that majority opinion—the conservative blog Mr. Conservative cited another blog post and connected the dots for us:
“Jake Baker, writing at a blog called No Compromise offers an interesting new theory: he thinks that the Obama administration may have threatened to take Roberts’ children away from him. You see, they’re not his biological children. Instead, the Chief Justice and his wife adopted them in 2000. Roberts has never talked about the circumstances of their adoption, which is perfectly understandable, given the privacy such a personal transaction deserves. To the extent it’s mentioned, they’ve been said to have been adopted from a Latin American country – something inconsistent with their Nordic coloring.”
A thorough Google search suggests that Baker's original blog post no longer exists—beyond the Internet Archive, anyway—but the theory lives on. As Wayne Root writes in the conclusion of his Blaze piece, “The Obama Crime Family is in charge.” Italics his.