Maybe Justice Roberts ended up voting to uphold 'Obamacare' to prevent Clarence Thomas from casting the deciding vote in the case. Calls to impeach Justice Thomas for not recusing himself based on his wife's financial interest in the outcome were renewed even though Thomas ended up in the minority. If the law had been struck down 5-4, Thomas could be said to have cast the deciding vote, and those calls for impeachment would have been much louder. Thomas would likely have brazened it out, and gotten away with that course, but the reputation of the Supreme Court would have taken another severe blow, perhaps comparable to the reactions to Bush v Gore and Citizens United.
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