Category Archives: The Courts

Justice John Roberts Cements Position … On The DC Party Circuit

Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Law, The Courts

Did you expect anything different from Justice John G. Roberts Jr.? Why? This is the chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, who had previously rewritten Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power.

What did this “conservative” jurist do NOW? Reports Lyle Denniston of the SCOTUS Blog:

… a divided Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that subsidies to help lower-income Americans buy health insurance will remain available in all fifty states.

That, the Court concluded by a six-to-three vote, was what Congress intended when it passed the sweeping overhaul of the health insurance market five years ago. If the subsidies are not available across the nation, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., wrote for the majority, that would bring about “the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid.”

Had the ruling in King v. Burwell gone the other way, to eliminate subsidies in thirty-four states, at least 6.4 million Americans likely would have almost immediately lost the insurance coverage that many of them have for the first time. And, given the way Congress wrote an interlocking law, the cascading effect of the loss of subsidies for so many probably would have collapsed the whole arrangement — a point that Roberts embraced in foreseeing the potential for a “death spiral” for the ACA.

The Chief Justice’s twenty-one-page opinion was an often technical interpretation of many arcane provisions of the ACA, but it was clear that the outcome had been driven in considerable part because the majority had accepted the centrality of the subsidy scheme to the law as a whole, and had found persuasive the dire predictions of the impact of sharply paring down that scheme.

The decision closely tracked most of the arguments that the Obama administration had made in defending the nationwide availability of subsidies, in the form of tax credits. …

MORE.

“A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” will show that Roberts has always been about the moves. With his affirmation of the right of the state to compel the individual into a purchase, Justice Roberts moved into the DC party circuit. Roberts’ smooth moves, today, on behalf of The Powers will cement his position on this circuit.

‘Cromnibus’ And Other Unrepublican (Small ‘r’) Crappiness

Conservatism, Constitution, Debt, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, The Courts

Nothing much at all remains of the original, American constitutional scheme, which was supposed to respect process above all, but is now result-oriented. Andrew McCarthy examines “last week’s “cromnibus” debacle” as well as the decision, Tuesday, of “a federal court in Pittsburgh—it “ruled that Obama’s amnesty decree is unconstitutional”—only to conclude that,

Imperious judicial activism is no better than imperious executive overreach. That the result the judge reaches happens to accord with conservative sentiments does not make the exercise any less invalid. After all, what offends conservatives about President Obama’s machinations is his disregard for the Constitution’s limits on his authority. Judge Schwab, analogously, has run roughshod over constitutional boundaries that limit the exercise of judicial authority. The Constitution empowers judges to resolve only cases and controversies that are actually before the court. In this case, President Obama’s decree was not before Judge Schwab — at least until he gratuitously directed the parties, who had not raised it, to address it.

These two cases are simply standard operating procedure for a Congress and a judiciary engaged in habitual, unpardonable transgressions. McCarthy’s is a good analysis, however, he should not be scandalized about business as usual in America’s highly centralized, politicized, mobocracy.

MORE McCarthy.

Loretta Lynch, Next AG

Justice, Law, The Courts, War on Drugs

“If you liked Eric Holder you’ll love Obama’s new AG pick,” warns WND about “federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to become the next attorney general.”

This is true when it comes to waging the wicked War on Drugs. Eric Holder’s only redeeming feature as attorney general was that he put a crimp in the War on Drugs and in “mass incarceration.”

Holder said [correctly] that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” He boldly worked to change that and could very well go down in history as the Attorney General who began unwinding the war on drugs and steering our country away from mass incarceration.

Lynch was actually a drug prosecutor. The other thing Lynch had no shame in doing was shaking down banks: she extracted a “US$7 billion settlement” from Citigroup.

Chicago Tribune is somewhat contradictory in writing that “Lynch was never part of Obama’s inner circle. But she was close to Holder.” Holder is Obama’s inner circle.

Lynch also “chairs the Justice Department committee that advises Holder on policy decisions. In that role, she traveled to Washington often, working closely with senior Justice officials.”