While most readers found the recent Time Magazine profile of Justice Anthony Kennedy to be an innocuous piece about the justice who has emerged as a deciding vote on some of the more divisive Supreme Court decisions, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) sees a surreptitious effort by the media to convince Kennedy to uphold the health care reform law.
While speaking to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association earlier this week, Bachmann warned that if Kennedy is “succumbing to flattery in the media” then “he could potentially be persuaded to go the way of the left,” as liberals “are not above doing anything that they can to influence that one swing voter.” She insisted that if the ruling is upheld, potentially due to media influence, it will mean “the end of our Constitution and the end of our Republic as we know it” in addition to “one of the final so to speak nails in the coffin to our country.”
Rios: I’ve been out of the country Michele but when I came back one of the first things I did was spotted TIME Magazine, I don’t know if you saw this, but Anthony Kennedy’s face, they did an entire, many, many, many pages profile of Anthony Kennedy with his picture on the cover, a very flattering profile as you can imagine. I thought at the time, that was just last weekend, I thought, ‘this doesn’t seem appropriate to me.’ They are getting ready to make all these major decisions and they are talking about that he is the main vote on the court because he is the swing vote, this is what they always say, and they do this total puff piece on him, didn’t you think that was a little unseemly?
Bachmann: I think that what we need to recognize is that the left is committed to outcome-based Supreme Court decisions, they want what they want, bottom line, the end justifies the means, they want socialized medicine, they want the government to control it and so they are not above doing anything that they can to influence that one swing voter. By everyone’s estimation, Anthony Kennedy is the justice who will make the decision if we have socialized medicine, which in my opinion will be the end of our Constitution and the end of our Republic as we know it. It will bankrupt us, there is no question Obamacare will do that, and it will change our relationship to government forever. I think it will be one of the final so to speak nails in the coffin to our country. If he makes that decision and if he is succumbing to flattery in the media, and these are human beings we’re talking about, he could potentially be persuaded to go the way of the left, that could be, and I think that’s why it wouldn’t surprise me at all that we are seeing these big, flattery pieces.
