Linda Greenhouse on King v. Burwell and "the devoutly Catholic chief justice" (Trinity Code Ed.)

Linda Greenhouse detects a possible conservative conspiracy to "put the heat on John Roberts." Her evidence is an opinion piece by John Yoo at National Review Online. In that piece, Yoo lays out four reasons that the Supreme Court is likely to agree with the petitioners in King v. Burwell that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act only authorizes subsidies to purchase insurance coverage for those who purchase from a state-established exchange. 

Yoo's reason three is that the case provides Chief Justice Roberts "the chance to atone for his error in upholding Obamacare as a valid use of the taxing clause in that case." Yoo argues that "it will be the mission of [Roberts's] Chief Justiceship to repair the damage." 

As the careful reader has no doubt already discerned from this language, Yoo is obviously trying to influence Chief Justice Roberts by appealing to his Catholicism. Linda Greenhouse explains: "His choice of the words 'atone' and 'mission,' with their religious resonance addressed to the devoutly Catholic chief justice, is no accident." Obviously. And that is really only scratching the surface. Maybe because Greenhouse is not Catholic, she did not know that part of our code is to send these religiously resonant messages in our third point. Because, the Trinity. (I have no idea whether Yoo is Catholic, but if not, he probably knows the Trinity code secret from some of his Catholic friends.)

Or maybe Greenhouse just did not want to pile on. Maybe her knowledge of the Trinity code is what explains her focus only on the first three sentences of Yoo's point three. Once you know what message is really being conveyed, you can ignore obvious surplusage like the fourth sentence: "Plus, the insincere misreading of the statute will grate especially hard on Roberts's professionalism--he seems to take seriously getting the right lawyerly answer to technical statutory questions." You see, Yoo obviously cannot believe that or expect his readers to believe it either. Plus, that fourth sentence, like this fourth sentence, begins with plus. Plainly surplusage, like this paragraph. (As any good Catholic coder would, I made my real point in the third paragraph. In case it wasn't obvious, and to help the uninitiated, that's why my third word in my third paragraph was "careful" and my third sentence was just one word: "Obviously." For those keeping score at home, extra points for just one word in sentence three of paragraph three and triple word score bonus for third word in title reading "no" spelled backwards.)