(Brownstone Institute)—Chief Justice John Roberts once flipped his vote on Obamacare to appease the DC establishment. Will he capitulate again in Murthy v. Missouri?
In 2012, after oral arguments in Sebelius v. NFIB, the Supreme Court met in a secret conference to determine the constitutionality of Obamacare and its “individual mandate.” Following three days of oral arguments, hundreds of pages in briefing, and hours in chambers with clerks and fellow Justices, Roberts provided the critical fifth vote to create a majority holding that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional.
But the arguments did not cease when the Court adjourned, and the Chief soon dithered under public scrutiny.
Three days after oral arguments, President Obama spoke from the Rose Garden to pressure the Court to uphold his signature legislation. Senator Patrick Leahy, then Chair of the Judiciary Committee, addressed Roberts on the Senate floor weeks later. “I trust [Roberts] will be a Chief Justice for all of us and that he has a strong sense of the proper role of the Judicial Branch.” Newspapers and cable news anchors warned Roberts that if he voted with the majority “his ambition of transcending politics on the Supreme Court will have to be judged a failure.”
The Wall Street Journal took note of this in its column “Targeting John Roberts: the left tries to intimidate the High Court on Obamacare” arguing “We doubt the High Court will be intimidated by any of this, and…no Justice would be worthy to sit on the Court if he is…The Court’s reputation will be tarnished if it bows to the political distemper of the moment, not if it follows the Constitution.” But the editorial staff was wrong.
Chief Justice Roberts flipped his vote in response to the public pressure. CBS reported that “Roberts switched views to uphold health care laws,” writing “Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As Chief Justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the court, and he also is sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public.”
Supporters and critics agreed that Roberts’ decision was a political calculation rather than a legal determination. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat authored “John Roberts’s Political Decision,” writing that Obamacare was “saved by political considerations.” At National Review, Jonah Goldberg noted, “No one is confident, never mind certain, that Roberts actually believes his own position.”
Now, the Court faces another Democratic president’s unprecedented expansion of federal power in Murthy v. Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v. Biden). Like the Obamacare case, decided in 2012, the decision comes in an election year and features the heavy-handed influence of the medical industry’s lobbying and public pressure campaigns.
On Monday, the Court will hear oral arguments in the case, and the Justices will confront the most pervasive forces in American society: the private-public censorship industry, the influence of the Intelligence Community, and the Biden Administration’s repeated attacks on free expression.
The argument comes just two weeks after President Biden’s targeting of the Court in his State of the Union address and amidst the regime’s demonstrated antipathy for the separation of powers.
May 2020: The Chief Invents a Pandemic Exception to the Constitution
Just two months into the Covid response, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rebut the government’s tarnishment of the Bill of Rights. The Justices could affirm that our Constitution has no pandemic exception, and cloaks of benevolent phrasing cannot warrant the usurpation of our liberties.
Instead, Chief Justice Roberts suspended the Constitution in deference to “experts,” thus ushering in three years of emergency orders from charlatans and petty tyrants. It proved a turning point in the Covid response, acting as a green light for prolonged church closings, First Amendment violations, and turnkey totalitarianism.
In May 2020, a California church petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Governor Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on church attendance. The “fog of war” is no excuse for “violating fundamental constitutional rights,” they argued.
Newsom’s order limited attendance at religious ceremonies to 25% capacity with a maximum of 100 attendees, no matter the size of the venue. The State offered no “justification for this arbitrary cap,” the church explained. Retail stores were permitted to hold 50% capacity at the time, and offices, food packaging, museums, and and “every other sector [had] no percentage cap.”
Four members of the Court were able to see through the state’s flimsy pretext of “public health.” Justice Kavanaugh asked, “Assuming all of the same precautions are taken, why can someone safely walk down a grocery store aisle but not a pew? And why can someone safely interact with a brave deliverywoman but not with a stoic minister?” Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas joined Kavanaugh in voting to grant the church’s motion.
The liberal wing of the court – Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer – voted to deny the motion without offering any opinion to support their vote.
The critical fifth vote thus came to the Chief Justice. Roberts sided with Governor Newsom, arguing that the Court should defer to “experts” because the “unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
Of course, every tyrant has claimed “competence” to control the lives of his subjects. Our Constitution, however, is designed to restrain all men, regardless of self-proclaimed insight, genius, or title, from abridging the rights of citizens.
The Chief’s fifth vote ignored constitutional text in favor of an imaginary pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights. As the head of the judicial branch, his deciding vote suspended judicial review as lockdowns obliterated Americans’ liberty.
The Chief Justice continued his deference to “experts” for over a year despite their demonstrable failures. Two months after the California decision, he again provided the fifth vote to uphold Nevada’s limit of religious gatherings to 50 people, despite the order permitting casinos to hold up to 500 gamblers at a time. Justice Gorsuch explained in dissent: “the First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion. The world we inhabit today, with a pandemic upon us, poses unusual challenges. But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”
The death of Justice Ginsburg and the confirmation of Justice Barrett to the Court flipped the 5-4 split, but Chief Justice Roberts continued his pandemic-exception jurisprudence into 2021. In February 2021, he upheld California’s banning on singing in church, explaining that “federal courts owe significant deference to politically accountable officials with the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health.”
In April 2021, he voted to deny Californians’ petition to challenge Governor Newsom’s edict limiting in-home religious gatherings to three households. Justice Barrett, however, overrode his dissent, and the Court restored the petitioners’ First Amendment freedoms.
Unclouding the Fog of War
The Chief Justice has a penchant to capitulate to political pressure. Murthy v. Missouri features perhaps the most powerful and united hegemon that the Court has ever encountered.
Let us hope that the Chief no longer allows the fog of war or fear of political blowback to excuse the deliberate and repeated violations of fundamental constitutional rights.
Alexander Hamilton noted in Federalist, No. 78, “whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.”
It is not just the Court’s power to remedy usurpations of our liberty, but it is its duty. The Chief has been derelict in the past, deferring to the capricious whims of political opportunists, but Murthy v. Missouri offers the Chief an opportunity to reaffirm his Court’s commitment to the Constitution.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
