I spotted this car at a shopping center in suburban Loudoun County, VA, a few hours after the Supreme Court decision to uphold the statist health care law:
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June 28, 2012
No joy in LoCo
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There is an article over at Slate I just read. If the author is correct, Roberts managed to take a political mess and flip it across his hip like a judo move so he could put it on its back- maybe permanently.
ReplyDeleteThe Left wants to be able to control all of your life. The worry was if the Court accepted the argument under the Commerce Clause that doing nothing is the same as doing something, the Left wins completely.
Roberts shot that one in both feet by writing the opinion. The reason he said the mandate was a tax was to limit Congress’s grab for your life. Here is the link.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/scocca/2012/06/roberts_health_care_opinion_commerce_clause_the_real_reason_the_chief_justice_upheld_obamacare_.single.html
“…The scholars expected to see the court gut existing Commerce Clause precedent and overturn the individual mandate in a partisan decision: Five Republican-appointed justices voting to rewrite doctrine and reject Obamacare; four Democratic-appointed justices dissenting.
Roberts was smarter than that. By ruling that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax, he joined the Democratic appointees to uphold the law—while joining the Republican wing to gut the Commerce Clause (and push back against the necessary-and-proper clause as well). Here’s the Chief Justice’s opinion (italics in original):
Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Congress already possesses expansive power to regulate what people do. Upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clause would give Congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce.”
The business about “new and potentially vast” authority is a fig leaf. This is a substantial rollback of Congress’ regulatory powers, and the chief justice knows it. It is what Roberts has been pursuing ever since he signed up with the Federalist Society. In 2005, Sen. Barack Obama spoke in opposition to Roberts’ nomination, saying he did not trust his political philosophy on tough questions such as “whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce.” Today, Roberts did what Obama predicted he would do.
Roberts’ genius was in pushing this health care decision through without attaching it to the coattails of an ugly, narrow partisan victory. Obama wins on policy, this time. And Roberts rewrites Congress’ power to regulate, opening the door for countless future challenges. In the long term, supporters of curtailing the federal government should be glad to have made that trade. …”
Sometimes you have to take a breath and wait for the smoke to clear. I haven’t read the dissent yet, but I’m willing to bet it is so punishing the “its a good law” crap won’t survive.
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