FBI's Ten Most Wanted list — its past and present

FBI's Ten Most Wanted list — its past and present

WASHINGTON â€" The idea came out of a card game. A reporter playing Hearts with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover asked him to name the meanest, wiliest fugitives the bureau could not track down. He thought putting their pictures in the newspaper might help.

It was 1949 and Hoover long had insisted no one could outsmart his FBI, not for long anyway. But a few weeks later, 10 names and pictures appeared at the reporter's door, and he got them plastered on the front of the Washington Daily News.

They were a sorry lot. Four escapees, three con men, two accused murderers and a bank robber. They were plucked from 5,700 fugitives hiding in the U.S. or abroad. To Hoover's surprise, nine of the 10 were soon captured. A year later, the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list was officially born.

Since then, 497 fugitives have made the roster. Their photos and IDs have gone from newspaper pages to TV screens, from post office posters to iPhone apps. Some names remain etched in the nation's psyche, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin, James Earl Ray; serial killer Ted Bundy; and Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

In recent months, new details about some of the cases have come to light as about 250 former FBI agents have told their stories in oral histories that will be housed at the National Law Enforcement Museum when it opens next year in Washington.

"There are some big names, and some unsung heroes in here," said Susan Walton Wynkoop, a former agent helping spearhead the project.

John Fox, the FBI's in-house historian, said the list reflects the changing phenomenon of crime in America. The 1950s: bank robbers, prison escapees and car thieves. The '60s and '70s: anti-war radicals and organized crime figures. The '80s and '90s: drug traffickers and sexual predators. The current era: international terrorism.

"You have to be someone … who is missing, escaped from prison, disappeared after you were indicted," Fox said. "You have to vanish."

Candidates for the list are nominated by the 56 FBI field offices. Who is most dangerous? Who is likely to be found? Will national exposure help find them? At headquarters in Washington, the Criminal Investigative Division reviews the candidates and senior managers make the final call.

Slots open up when a suspect is captured or dies, or when charges are dropped. Some are caught within hours; some take decades. Two were fingered after visitors touring FBI headquarters recognized their pictures.

About 94% of those on the list have been arrested, a third of them after tips from the public. "We certainly think it's been effective," Fox said.

First on the official FBI list was Thomas James Holden. On June 5, 1949, he killed his wife and her two brothers in their fourth-floor apartment in Chicago. He left the .38 revolver, four spent cartridges and two loaded shells on the dresser.

Agents tracked him to Cedar Lake, Ind., but the trail went cold. Yet as the list circulated, a reader of the Oregonian newspaper in Portland spotted a black-and-white photo on Page 7.

The paper said the fugitive was "a menace to every man, woman and child in America." But the reader recognized the man in the photo as John McCullough, with whom he worked as a plasterer. The next day agents appeared at the job site and arrested Holden.

Glen Roy Wright, No. 8 on the original list, was a prison escapee out of Oklahoma; he had persuaded the guards to let him visit his supposedly ailing mother. After a string of robberies, he relocated to Salina, Kan., and patrons at a local drug store wondered about the stranger in town. The next time Wright stopped in, the FBI was waiting.

Those early captures thrilled the country and enthused the FBI. They kept the list rolling.

James "Whitey" Bulger Jr., wanted for mob killings in Boston, was the oldest fugitive â€" 69 when he was added in 1999. He was 81 when the FBI caught him last year near his Santa Monica apartment.

Victor Manuel Gerena, who allegedly handcuffed two of his colleagues and made off with $7 million in their Wells Fargo armored car, has been missing the longest â€" 28 years. Best guess? Hiding in Cuba.

"He still is a Top Ten fugitive," lamented retired Agent William E. Dyson. All they know for sure, Dyson said, is the $7 million showed up in Puerto Rico.

Presidential campaigns missing the mark in advertising to Latinos

Presidential campaigns missing the mark in advertising to Latinos

Both political parties agree that the country's 21.3 million registered Latino voters could make a crucial difference in this year's presidential election.

Yet in a race defined by massive spending on television ads, fast-response Internet videos and sophisticated social media efforts, both President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney have fallen short thus far when it comes to targeting Latino voters electronically, according to some Spanish-language media experts.

Republican candidate Romney trails Obama badly among Latinos, according to polls released last week, and isn't counting on them to propel him to victory. Even so, his Spanish-language advertising has been minimal and clumsy, the experts said. Some of his ads are simply translated versions of his English-language commercials â€" a particular no-no when trying to reach Latino consumers.

Obama has spent more heavily, and created more effective ads than his rival, but some experts said that so far he has failed to craft a campaign that keeps pace with the rapidly increasing size and sophistication of the Latino population, which climbed to 50.5 million in the 2010 census, from 35.3 million a decade earlier.

Neither campaign has adopted the approach honed over the years by businesses targeting Spanish speakers â€" one that not only depicts Latinos in positive settings, but also reflects attention to cultural nuance. A truck ad in the Midwest, for example, will show American flags and beer-drinking men, while an ad for the same truck in Arizona will depict Latino men hauling construction equipment and managing their farms.

"In the TV world, there's incredible sensitivity to trying to get Latinos excited; there's tons of money spent on 'how do we get this demographic to like our product?'" said Matt Barreto, a prominent Latino pollster at the University of Washington. "The political world has been very slow to change."

Some marketing experts say Romney's Spanish-language efforts suggest he's abandoned hope altogether of reaching the Latino community. Polls indicate the same â€" an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll showed Obama led Romney 66% to 26% among Latino voters.

Romney's campaign has released two Spanish-language video ads so far â€" "Día Uno" and "Van Bien?" â€" but both are directly translated from identical ads in English, a blunder in Spanish-language marketing, said Glenn Llopis, founder of the Center for Hispanic Leadership.

"You can't just translate these things," Llopis said. "That's where a lot of these marketing things go wrong. They need to be customized, form-fitted. If the Hispanic community thinks you're just translating and not creating a campaign that speaks to them, they'll just shut off."

The ads also don't talk about issues such as healthcare and education that are important to Latino voters, many of whom are uninsured and benefit from policies such as Obama's healthcare law.

"Día Uno" talks about what the first day of a Romney presidency would look like, outlining objectives such as opening the Keystone oil pipeline and ending the healthcare law. "Van Bien?" picks up on an Obama comment that the private sector is "doing fine," and asks how the president can fix the economy if he doesn't understand it.

What's more, some of the phrases in those ads are awkwardly translated, said Melisa Diaz, a Latino media consultant based inWashington, D.C., who has worked for the Democratic National Committee.

"Doing Fine?" would be more accurately translated as "Las cosas están bien?" Diaz said, while the proper phrase to convey "the right direction" would be "la dirección correcta," not "la buena dirección," as used in the ads. And the English idiom "Day One" would be better if phrased "El Primer Día," not "Día Uno," Diaz said.

"These kind of mistakes would not happen in an English-language ad," she said. "You can tell that the ads were not proofed by a native speaker."

The Romney campaign did not have an official comment on the matter.

Shaky Spanish translation has tripped up politicians before. A Twitter feed, @ElBloombito, mocks the Spanish-speaking attempts of New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Will Ferrell poked fun at President George W. Bush's Spanish in a "Saturday Night Live" skit. And the Republican National Committee had a misstep on its Spanish-language website last month when it was revealed that stock photos of children on the website portrayed Asian children rather than Latinos.

But Bush and Bloomberg both had effective ads targeting the Latino community. Romney doesn't yet.

"In every way, he's not really courting the Latino vote," Barreto said. "He's doing as little as possible."

That includes spendi ng â€" Romney spent just $33,000 on Spanish-language ads between mid-April and mid-June in the battleground states of North Carolina and Ohio, while Obama spent $1.7 million over the same period, according to SMG-Delta. Romney trails Obama among Latino voters in battleground states by 36 points, according to a poll released last week by Latino Decisions and the left-leaning immigration reform group America's Voice.

Perhaps the Romney campaign is paying close attention to studies that show advertising in Spanish can turn off white and black voters. When white and black audiences saw ads with a Latino endorsement or in Spanish, their support for a candidate dropped, said Ricardo Ramirez, a professor of political science at Notre Dame.

"We know that appearing more inclusive by outreaching toward Latinos seems to work well for immigrants, but it seems to have a negative impact on blacks and whites," he said.

The Obama campaign has a Spanish-language website, a Twitter feed for Latinos, an English-language website targeted at Latinos and a Spanish-language website on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. After Obama's order that would allow young undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S., the campaign put out an ad in Spanish featuring Miami-based television personality Cristina Saralegui, who also endorsed the president.

That ad supplements two rounds of Spanish-language television commercials that had been running in the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada and Florida. They feature campaign volunteers talking about Obama policies that have affected them, including funding for Pell Grants and Head Start centers, and the Affordable Care Act.

"Under Obama's healthcare reform, you can't be denied insurance for preexisting conditions," one volunteer, Elena McCullough of Tampa, Fla., says as she visits with a concerned elderly couple.

While these ads are effective because they feature Latinos and are tailored to issues such as health and education, even they fall short when considering the nation's changing demographics, Ramirez said. The Latino population climbed by 43% between 2000 and 2010, and in swing states such as Florida, Latinos make up 13% of all registered voters.

"They're doing more in English-language media than they are in Spanish," he said. "They need to step it up."

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Healthcare law still faces obstacles

Healthcare law still faces obstacles

WASHINGTON â€" President Obama's healthcare law emerged from its bruising two-year legal ordeal largely intact, with its primary goal of guaranteeing all Americans health security still standing.

The Supreme Court, however, is only the first of several daunting obstacles the law must clear.

Most immediately is the November election, which could shift control of the White House and the Senate to Republicans, which would almost certainly spell the end for the Affordable Care Act.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has pledged to dismantle the law if he defeats Obama. And stripping funding for its main parts would be relatively easy for a GOP Congress, even if the party had only a narrow majority in the Senate.

Even if Obama wins a second term, there is no guarantee the law will survive in its current form. Pressure is mounting in Washington to dramatically cut federal spending as budget deficits yawn. And the president and other supporters of the law may be hard-pressed to defend the $1.7-trillion price tag for expanding insurance coverage over the next decade.

"This is not a healthcare issue. It's a money issue," said Tom Scully, who oversaw the Medicare and Medicaid programs under PresidentGeorge W. Bush and supports much of the law. Scully, now a senior counsel at the law firm Alston Bird, called the projected spending in the healthcare bill "the single biggest moving piece in any budget pu zzle next year."

But going after the Affordable Care Act may be politically risky for the GOP.

Although the overall law is unpopular, many parts have broad support, including provisions to guarantee health coverage to all Americans, even if they are sick or poor. And with every passing day, hospitals, doctors, insurers and state leaders nationwide are implementing more of the law, making it more difficult to unwind.

But in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, conservative calls for repeal have become even more insistent.

Republicans on Capitol Hill, who plan another symbolic vote in July to scrap the law, are promising to go after the law's funding next year, a pledge that will be hard to walk away from. "The real outcome of … [the court's] decision is to strengthen our resolve to make sure that this law is in fact repealed," House SpeakerJohn A. Boehner(R-Ohio) said.

Democrats would be largely powerless to stop that if they lost the Senate and the White House in November. They now number 51 in the Senate, plus two independents who caucus with the party. It is far from clear that they will retain their edge.

Under Senate rules, legislation that has a fiscal impact can be passed with a simple majority, not the 60-vote supermajority that has become customary to overcome filibusters on important legislation. This process, known as budget reconciliation, was used by Republicans to pass major tax cuts under Bush, and by Democrats to pass the last piece of the healthcare law in 2010.

It may be difficult to use budget reconciliation to repeal the entire health law because some provisions â€" including consumer protections such as the insurance guarantee â€" have little direct impact on the federal budget.

But reconciliation could be used to strip out hundreds of billions of dollars of new government spending in the law designed to expand access to Medicaid and to provide subsidies to help millions o f low- and moderate-income Americans buy health insurance. Without that money, the law's promise of universal health coverage would be essentially meaningless.

A series of new taxes in the law on insurers, medical device makers and high-income taxpayers â€" which are designed to offset the cost of expanding coverage â€" would also be easy to remove. "There is an enormous amount that you could take out," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who now heads the conservative American Action Forum.

Even supporters of the law acknowledge budget reconciliation is a serious threat. "If Republicans control all the levers of policymaking, even if they have a narrow majority in the Senate, they could … eviscerate the Affordable Care Act," said Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack, a leading consumer advocate.

An Obama victory in November would ensure some protection for the law for the next four years.

Obama has indicated he would veto any legislation aimed directly at defunding the law. And last year, as he struck a deal with congressional Republicans to raise the federal government's debt ceiling, he rejected Republican efforts to change the law.

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a leading Obama supporter, predicted the president would never yield to pressure to scale back the healthcare law.

"He's not going to let that happen," Durbin said. "As far as he is concerned, and I happen to agree with him, it's hands off. Let this thing go into effect. He's invested too much, and we've invested too much, to get to this point and turn around."

The law's largest benefits â€" including guaranteed coverage and new insurance exchanges to help consumers shop for insurance plans â€" are slated to go into effect in 2014.

But budgetary politics may still derail full implementation of the law.

Many in Washington predict that Congress and th e White House will have to strike the largest budget deal in a generation next year to deal with the expiring Bush tax cuts, the mounting debt and a series of unpopular cuts to Medicare, defense and other domestic programs mandated by the 2011 budget compromise.

"Things will be different next year," predicted Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one of a bipartisan group of six senators who nearly struck a major deficit deal in 2011. "Everything is going to be on the table."

Lawmakers are already looking for more ways to pare back spending on the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled amid warnings from government actuaries that in 12 years, the program's main trust fund will start running in the red.

And the Medicaid program for poor Americans, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government, is pushing many state budgets to the breaking point, intensifying pressure on Washington to allow states to cut back.

The new healthcare law's plan fo r expanding health coverage through Medicaid and through new subsidies to help low- and moderate-income Americans buy private health insurance is not as expensive as the current Medicare and Medicaid programs.

But the coverage expansion is expected to cost more than $200 billion a year by 2018. That will make it a tempting target for negotiators trying to strike a grand bargain to balance the federal budget.

noam.levey@latimes.com

Try This! Vault a wall

Try This! Vault a wall

Michael "Frosti" Zernow might like life's obstacles more than most of us.

Zernow is a professional parkour athlete. Parkour, a discipline developed in France, involves smoothly navigating over and around obstacles like walls, stairs and trees with jumps, climbs and acrobat-like moves. Zernow makes it look effortless, but it takes practice and discipline if you don't want to crash, scrape your knees or find another cause to search for first aid. Once you've got the skills, parkour (also called free-running) is a blast, and you can do it almost anywhere.

Zernow, who lives in Santa Monica, has 10-plus years of experience and makes every move look easy.

But some moves can be tricky and require a level of athleticism. Classes are available at Tempest Freerunning Academy in Chatsworth, tempestacademy.com.

This safety vault, Zernow says, is "the first vault I would teach anybody."

What it does

It's a powerful all-body exercise. And it's one of the things you absolutely need to be able to do if you want to get good at parkour.

How to do it

Find a wall about waist height, get a running start, then vault over it. For the safety vault, stay in contact with the wall at all times, using one hand, two hands, a foot â€" whatever it takes â€" to control yourself as you get over.

How much:

As your confidence develops, try to string as many as 10 vaults in a row. "Once you feel really good, see if you can stay moving for 30 seconds â€" then you're training just like the pros," Zernow says.

healt h@latimes.com

Conservatives still control high court despite healthcare ruling

Conservatives still control high court despite healthcare ruling

Supporters of the healthcare reform act upheld by the Supreme Court last week should stop celebrating and take a deep breath. Nestled within the multiple opinions issued by the justices are some disquieting hints that the high court's hostility toward government control over corporate power hasn't changed.

To put it bluntly: The court's four conservative horsemen are still in the saddle.

The original Four Horsemen were a conservative bloc that worked to overturn a string of PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives in the 1930s. They held firm against expansive interpretations of the Constitution's commerce clause that would give government the tools to address modern crises, such as the Great Depression.

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The clause, which awards Congress exclusive power over interstate commerce, was at the heart of the arguments in court over the healthcare reform act, particularly the act's mandate that individuals and families purchase insurance coverage or pay a tax-based penalty instead.

Among the issues was whether people who did not carry health insurance were participating in interstate commerce in a way that brought them within the clause's authority. The reform law's opponents argued that "inaction" â€" the failure to buy insurance â€" was by definition not commerce. Supporters responded that everyone in America participates in the interstate commercial market for healthcare, because sooner or later everyone will need treatment; those who don't have insurance are simply making a choice about how, when or whether to pay for it that can be properly regulated by congressional action.

Four present-day conservative horsemen â€" Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. K ennedy, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas â€" produced a joint dissent to Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr.'s majority opinion effectively upholding the mandate. Their dissent accepted the "inaction" argument, but also was shot through with what sounded like complaints about being forced to live in a modern world in which the definition of "commerce" is constantly expanded.

They wrote: "We now have sizable federal departments devoted to subjects not mentioned [by the Constitution] among Congress' enumerated powers, and only marginally related to commerce: the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development."

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts showed himself to be fully as hidebound as they in his interpretation of the commerce clause. He found that the individual mandate would be unconstitutional if it were based on the commerce clause alone. But by ruling that it was a permiss ible offshoot of Congress' taxing authority, he settled on a finesse that also dates from the 1930s. Back then, liberal Justices Louis Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone quietly advised New Dealers that the best way to inoculate the Social Security bill from attack by conservatives on the high court was by casting it as a tax measure. Their reasoning, followed by Roberts, was that the federal government's taxing power is virtually unlimited.

It was left to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a separate opinion on the healthcare act joined in whole or part by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan andStephen G. Breyer, to identify the danger to congressional power to right wrongs implicit in Roberts' views. His "crabbed reading of the commerce clause," she wrote, "harks back to the era in which the court routinely thwarted Congress' efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of t hose who labor to sustain it."

Lest anyone mistake her point, she cited a New Deal-era case in which the court threw out a railroad workers' retirement measure on the grounds that any law applying to "the social welfare of the worker [is] ... remote from any regulation of commerce as such."

The intransigence of the original Four Horsemen drove FDR and other progressives to distraction. "We have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce," he fumed after an especially irksome decision.

By 1937, especially after being challenged by FDR's ill-fated court-packing scheme that year, the Supreme Court had developed a more modern view of commerce. Since then, Ginsburg observed, the court "has recognized Congress' large authority to set the nation's course in the economic and social welfare realm."

Is that authority again in question? Roberts in his opinion made no pretense that he actually favored the healthcare reform act or even agreed with its goals, but made his ruling on narrowly legalistic grounds. "We do not consider whether the act embodies sound policies," he wrote. "Those decisions are entrusted to our nation's elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices."

Little in last week's ruling suggests that the court is inclined to stray from a path that has led it to enhance the power of big business and big money to get their way, arguably at the expense of the citizenry in general â€" the 99%, to use the formulation of the Occupy movement.

This course was established by the Roberts court's egregious 2010 Citizens United decision, which invalidated limits on corporate participation in elections. Indeed, days before the healthcare ruling, the court summarily overturned a Montana ban on corporat e political donations, thus signalizing that the trend unleashed by Citizens United applied to state and local elections as well as federal.

The four-judge minority in the healthcare case â€" traditionally the heart of a five-judge conservative majority when joined by Roberts â€" built their dissent around fears that if the individual mandate in health insurance stood, there would be no limit on federal authority to pursue social goals, however they might be defined. The risible broccoli analogy raised during oral arguments in the case in March made a prominent return to the stage â€" "the failure of some to eat broccoli may be found to deprive them of a newly discovered cancer-fighting chemical," in which case moving against the inactivity of not eating broccoli would come within the government's "unenumerated problem-solving powers," the dissent posited.

To go from a law designed to extend healthcare to 30 million uninsured people to a fantasy in which the gove rnment shoves vegetables down its citizens' throats is to envision a world in which the government in fact has no power, but private enterprise has free rein. In her opinion, Ginsburg contemplated this "outlandish" argument, which Roberts mentioned approvingly, with open suspicion. Mischievously, she enlisted conservative icon Robert Bork as a counterfoil, quoting him as writing, "Judges and lawyers live on the slippery slope of argument; they are not supposed to ski it to the bottom."

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

Chief Justice Roberts reaches for greatness

Chief Justice Roberts reaches for greatness

It is common to refer to the Supreme Court by the name of its chief justice. But merely having the title isn't enough to make a chief the court's dominant legal presence.

For instance, folks don't talk much about the Waite court that existed from 1874 to 1888 (during which Morrison Remick Waite presided), or the White court that ran from 1910 to 1921 (during which Edward Douglass White Jr. served at the helm). On the other hand, the great chiefs, such as John Marshall and Earl Warren, attained greatness for their courts and themselves by authoring momentous decisions that shaped the basic contours of the American system.

In writing Thursday's landmark ruling upholding the key aspects of President Obama's healthcare law, while at the same time cutting back on established understandings of federal power, Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr. claimed the current Supreme Court as his own, and began to build for himself a legacy of greatness.

VIDEO: Healthcare law survives, with Roberts' help

Over the last year â€" indeed, the last six years â€" Justice Anthony M. Kennedyhas most consistently been in the majority in hotly contested 5-4 rulings. Roberts, on the other hand, has been in dissent in many significant criminal procedure decisions. But in the healthcare case that defined this term â€" and perhaps this decade â€" for the court, Roberts ruled and Kennedy lost (as did all the other justices, in a sense, because Roberts was the only justice who agreed with every single important thing the court decided in the case). It is not an exaggeration to say that the Affordable Care Act case was â€" in terms of the number of people affected, the amount of money involved and the symbolic, political and institutional stakes on the line â€" bigger than all the other 70-some cases the court decided this year put together.

What does Roberts' action in the healthcare dispute say about the kind of chief he is? It tells us he shares or at least appreciates the instincts of some of his most revered predecessors. Take towering Chief Justice Marshall, who led the court from 1801 to 1835. The Marshall court's two most enduring opinions are McCulloch vs. Maryland and Marbury vs. Madison. In McCulloch (a case upholding federal authority to charter the Bank of the United States), the court made clear that Congress' powers are finite but broad, and that Congress must be given the benefit of the doubt so long as its objectives are legitimate and sincere and the means it uses are likely to advance those objectives. That is essentially the methodology Roberts used to uphold the individual mandate provision as a permissible tax.

In Marbury (the case known for cementing the court's competence to declare federal statutes in valid when they run afoul of the Constitution), Marshall succeeded in moving constitutional law toward his own ideological sympathies while reaching an immediate result that avoided a direct political confrontation with a president (Thomas Jefferson) who opposed Marshall's basic vision.

DOCUMENT: Supreme Court ruling on healthcare law

Roberts' healthcare ruling did exactly the same things. Even as it upheld a law in which the president had invested significant political capital, Roberts' ruling placed new limits on Congress' commerce and spending clause powers, thereby promoting the conservative constitutional values that Roberts has always espoused. Moreover, the chief justice accomplished this in the context of an overall outcome that makes it hard for Obama and others who differ from Roberts' basic constitutional outlook to complain, and in a manner that en hances the credibility of the court as an independent, nonpartisan arbiter.

Roberts' actions also invite comparisons to those of Chief Justice Warren (known to some admirers as "Super Chief"), whose signature achievement was obtaining unanimity for his path-breaking opinion invalidating public school segregation designed to subjugate blacks. Roberts was not able to get all of the current court to agree to his healthcare resolution â€" he is only human â€" but it is noteworthy that he got seven votes (including Justices Stephen G. Breyerand Elena Kagan, both appointed by Democrats) to join in invalidating the Medicaid expansion conditions of the healthcare law, the only part of the act that was trimmed back. If the court is going to invalidate even a part of the most thoroughly vetted congressional legislation of the modern era at a time of hyper-partisanship, how refreshingly healthy and remarkable to have a cross-ideological coalition of justices doing it.

Not a ll chief justices have been successful at pivotal moments in avoiding altercation with oppositional presidents. Chief Justice Roger Taney (who authored the infamous Dred Scott ruling) picked, rather than passed up, fights with Abraham Lincoln. And Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes could not stop his court from demolishing huge chunks of PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt's early agenda.

Like these two men, Roberts was already chief justice when a watershed election swept a reform-minded president into the White House. But unlike these two earlier chiefs, Roberts â€" following the lead of Marshall â€" found a way to stand his intellectual ground without provoking a battle royal with the chief executive.

Now, the question becomes, What does the healthcare ruling portend for the Roberts court?

It would be unwise to think that Roberts will side with the so-called liberal justices in controversial cases often; he remains a solidly conservative jurist whose vote in the healthcare matter may free him up for the rest of his tenure to follow his conservative instincts, largely immune from the charge of partisan cronyism.

And the decision ought to remind us that, at least when the questions presented involve the authority of the federal government to meaningfully address the overriding problems of the day, we should stop focusing exclusively on Justice Kennedy as the decisive voice on the court, and also look to its formal leader, whose name will bear history's judgment for decisions reached by his court.

Vikram David Amar is a professor and the associate dean of UC Davis School of Law. Akhil Reed Amar is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of "America's Constitution: A Biography."

Yitzhak Shamir dies at 96; hard-line former Israeli prime minister

Yitzhak Shamir dies at 96; hard-line former Israeli prime minister

JERUSALEM â€" Yitzhak Shamir, the onetime underground Jewish fighter and long-serving Israeli prime minister whose unyielding belief in the right of Jews to all of the biblical Land of Israel often exasperated U.S. policymakers, has died. He was 96.

Shamir, who had Alzheimer's disease, died Saturday at a nursing home in the town of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. His death was announced by the Israeli government.

Israeli President Shimon Peres said Shamir was "a brave warrior before and after the founding of the state of Israel," according to a statement released Saturday. "He was loyal to his views, a great patriot and a true lover of Israel who served his country with integrity and unending commitment."

In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Shamir one of the "giants" who "established the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land."

Shamir, who emigrated from Poland 13 years before Israel's independence, belonged to the generation of Israelis who went on to lead the nation they had helped to create. But unlike some others from that era, the diminutive Shamir held fast to his hard-line views after climbing the Israeli political ladder to become prime minister for four terms during the 1980s and early 1990s.

His pugnacious attitude toward Arabs often put him at odds with U.S. officials, who saw him as an impediment to reconciliation with the Palestinians.

Shamir only grudgingly took part in a pivotal 1991 peace conference in Madrid that opened the way for talks with the Palestinians and led to a peace treaty with Jordan.

His tough-nosed views made him a darling of Jewish settlers and kept him atop the right-wing Likud Party for a decade after Menachem Begin, the former prime minister, stepped aside in 1983.

To the end of his life, Shamir never wavered in his defense of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip even though other hawkish Israeli leaders, such as Ariel Sharon, came to conclude that Israel was better off letting go of some areas. Shamir, whose parents and sisters died during the Holocaust, saw all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as a Jewish birthright.

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism," Shamir said in 1997, after his retirement from public life. "Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."

Born Itzhak Yezernitksy on Oct. 15, 1915, in present-day Belarus, Shamir was a 20-year-old university student when he arrived in what was then British-governed Palestine. Working variously as a construction worker and clerk, Shamir joined an underground movement of a hard-line school of Zionists known by its Hebrew acronym, Etzel.

When the group split in 1940, Shamir went with the more militant Lehi branch, which battled Arabs and launched attacks against the British military. The group, also known as the Stern Gang, drew inspiration from the Irish Republican Army. Shamir's nom de guerre was "Michael," after Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins.

Shamir was a leader of the band at a time when its operations included the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, and the 1948 killing of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman who served as the United Nations' representative in the region. Shamir's role was never definitively established.

Shamir was arrested twice by the British but escaped both times. Lehi disbanded after Israel achieved statehood.

During the 1950s, Shamir joined the Mossad spy agency, heading a team in Euro pe. He later moved into politics, joining the Herut Party under Begin. He won a seat in the Israeli parliament in 1973 as a member of Likud, which had merged Herut and smaller rightist groups.

Likud upended Israeli politics in 1977 when it defeated the long-dominant Labor Party, thrusting Begin into the prime minister's slot. Shamir became speaker of the parliament, or Knesset. Six years later, he inherited Likud, and the prime minister's job, when Begin abruptly quit a year after the invasion of Lebanon.

But a slew of economic troubles, including triple-digit inflation, took a toll on Shamir's standing, and he was forced to spend the rest of the decade in a coalition with the left-leaning Labor in order to keep power. He and Peres agreed to share the post for a term by taking turns as premier for two years each beginning in 1984.

Shamir opposed rapprochement with Israel's Arab neighbors and responded forcefully when the first Palestinian intifada erupted in 1987. Addressing settlers from atop a West Bank castle at the time, he vowed that "anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls."

His backing for the settlements and refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians put him at odds with the administration of President George H.W. Bush, which was promoting a peace process after the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel's right to exist in 1988.

James A. Baker III, then U.S. secretary of State, grew so frustrated with Shamir that he once recited the White House telephone number during congressional testimony, adding, "When you're serious about peace, call us."