“Anticipating A Turn of The Health-Care Screw,” last night’s Barely-a-Blog post title, was apt.
The SCROTUM would fail to dissolve “the hulking bill,” Orwellianly titled “The Affordable Care Act.” The Supermen Court, after all, doesn’t follow natural law; individual rights, or even the founders’ federalism.
Why, the Constitution itself, in all its amendments, has long since veered from the just law. All the more so the jurisprudence that “interprets” this already flawed, dead-letter scroll. (“Sometimes the law of the state coincides with the natural law.“ More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.”)
“As affable as he is,” said a September 15, 2005 blog post titled “Judge Roberts: Smooth Operator?”, during Roberts’ confirmation hearings, “Roberts, regrettably, is no Janice Rogers Brown.”
Their devotion (and dotage) prevents President Bush’s lickspittles from realizing that he too considers Rogers Brown ‘outside the mainstream,’ to use the Democrats’ demotic line. Let’s hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist.” AND, “here’s the thing that unsettles: Roberts seems to be all about the moves.”
Lyle Denniston, of the SCOTUS Blog, speaks to the technicalities of today’s decision, in “Don’t call it a mandate — it’s a tax”:
Salvaging the idea that Congress did have the power to try to expand health care to virtually all Americans, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of the crucial – and most controversial — feature of the Affordable Care Act. By a vote of 5-4, however, the Court did not sustain it as a command for Americans to buy insurance, but as a tax if they don’t. That is the way Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., was willing to vote for it, and his view prevailed. The other Justices split 4-4, with four wanting to uphold it as a mandate, and four opposed to it in any form.
Today’s Supreme Court is often referred to as Anthony Kennedy’s Court. Although Kennedy is the swing justice who usually casts the deciding vote in close cases, the landmark ruling this week in the healthcare cases clearly mark the maturation of the “Roberts Court.”
Chief Justice John Roberts was the surprising swing vote in today’s Obamacare decision. Although he agreed with the four conservative justices, including Kennedy, that the individual mandate was not a regulation of interstate commerce, he voted with the Court’s moderates to hold that it was justified as a tax. Because people who don’t obtain insurance pay a tax to the IRS, the mandate was within Congress’s power to raise taxes for the general welfare. As a result, the Affordable Care Act was upheld.
With this deft ruling, Roberts avoided what was certain to be a cascade of criticism of the high court. No Supreme Court has struck down a president’s signature piece of legislation in over 75 years. Had Obamacare been voided, it would have inevitably led to charges of aggressive judicial activism. Roberts peered over the abyss and decided he didn’t want to go there.
UPDATE: Absolutely right is the New York Time: “The decision was a victory for President Obama and Congressional Democrats, affirming the central legislative pillar of Mr. Obama’s presidency.”
AND, so was “SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES: ARIZONA ET AL. v. UNITED STATES.”
So, for heaven’s sake. Quit the denial. Liberty was not sundered with Obama. It’s long gone.