still operative and which aren't. If you're writing in dissent, that's a waste of time. Which makes me think ... maybe when this was written the author wasn't in dissent. So what happened here? Could be that this was written by the four conservative justices as a bizarro-world majority opinion as a sort of middle finger to Roberts on how things should have gone. But in that case, why didn't they add language attacking his opinion on Congress's taxing power specifically? It makes more sense to think this was the majority opinion at some point -- perhaps written by Roberts himself (since he likely assigned the opinion to himself from the beginning) and then discarded after he switched his vote. The other conservatives then salvaged his opinion, polished it up a bit, and republished it as their own, possibly as a tacit rebuke to Roberts or possibly because Roberts switched so late in the game that there wasn't time to draft something new from scratch. Or, as yet another alternative, maybe Roberts was on the fence all along, which spurred the conservative bloc and the liberal bloc to each write their own "majority" opinions in hopes of persuading him to join them as the fifth vote. When the conservative bloc ended up being disappointed, they left their opinion more or less as is, whether due to time constraints or pique or both. Any other theories? I don't buy the idea that Roberts flipped at the last minute because of all