Thank you, Chief Justice!
Perhaps we have a new swing vote to replace Kennedy.
Not remotely IMO. An extremely conservative justice albeit one who has some respect for precedent and some intellectual honesty unlike Alito, Gorsuch and and Thomas. That he is being viewed as a swing vote shows just how dramatically the Court has moved to the right
He has clearly been the swing vote just like yesterday. Kennedy was too a very conservative judge, and in fact had an equal conservative rating as Roberts with one major exception, gay rights. Remove Kennedy’s correct view ( my opinion) on all things gay rights and he voted 23 out of 25 times with the extreme right judges over the past decades on major split vote issues.
Don’t forget Kennedy voted to overturn Obamacare and I’m not sure he would not have voted with the right yesterday based on his past. It was Roberts that saved Obamacare six years ago, not Kennedy. I guess my point is, “if” there is a swing vote, it will be Roberts as there seems to be a lock 4-4 vote almost guaranteed anymore all too often, IMO. 
I always appreciate hearing your opinion, JC.
Roberts is sane and principled and very Conservative. He is the Conservative version of RBG or John Paul Stevens (R appointment). Sotomayor is probably more moderate than either. By most reasonable metrics, Kagan and Breyer are only Liberal by a hair. Souter (R appointment) and Merrick Garland were/are straight down the middle and Sandra Day O’Connor was Conservative, but not very. There simply is no modern SC Liberal equivalent to Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh. And there is no 21st century precedent for a Republican to appoint moderately Conservative justices*, despite at least 3 of the last five Democratic appointments being roughly moderate, with one straight down the middle.
*who are not the lunch lady.
The reason I post this is the recent R insistence on elevating to the SC activist justices who are outside the mainstream has the very real (and intended) possible outcome of fundamentally altering our rights and usurping normal legislative functions. And people like to say, “both sides do X,” or, “both sides do X, just to varying degrees,” and it is often true. But that simply is not the case re: SC appointments since Souter’s appointment almost 30 years ago. And the extreme-ifying of the Conservative side of the SC is causing politicization around it, generally (eg. McConnell’s Garland blockade). Which, in turn, is causing a general public skepticism regarding the most sacred of our institutions whose decisions are incredibly difficult to undo.
