Category Archives: supreme court
Bipartisanship
In the Obamacare ruling shakeout over the Obama Healthcare Mandate, it appears that Roberts changed his mind after writing the, then, majority opinion overturning the individual mandate based on the commerce clause. He later wrote the new majority opinion upholding the mandate under Congress’ taxing power.
The chief justice isn’t the only one having it both ways. Obama has loudly insisted an estimated one zillion times on national TV that the mandate is not a tax (and he still does, now that he’s won).
After Justice Kennedy’s famous question, “can we create commerce in order to regulate it?”, it looked like the court wasn’t going to uphold the mandate as regulated commerce. So, the administration lawyers argued, hell yes, it’s a tax!
Healthcare Rewrite
You’ll have to pass it to find out find out that Justice Roberts gutted the commerce clause according to Tom Scocca in Slate.
To which the WSJ says maybe so but he just increased Congress’ taxing power.
And Andy Wilson says the Chief Justice “…rewrote the statute in order to save it…” much to the dismay of its previous supporters and lobbyists.
Not a Tax until it Was
The Supreme Court has determined that the only way the individual mandate gets to be constitutional is if it’s a tax. Let’s have a little fun listening to The White House insisting that it’s not a tax – here, here, and even after the ruling, here. If they are right, they would be lawless by the court’s reasoning, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Would it be a rude to interrupt a press conference to find out?
Healthcare Ruling
Chief Justice Roberts bestowed the burden of victory on the president by calling the individual mandate a tax.
The dissenting minority accuse Roberts of rewriting the legislation. Well, can’t say we weren’t warned of conservative judicial activism.
The Hammer thinks Roberts heroically twisted and turned through narrow legal fissures to restore the integrity of the court, in the eyes of his enemies on left. Those enemies think the court soiled itself by putting George W. Bush in office in 2001 and that it has been illigit ever since.
But even as he saved Obamacare, Roberts found the use of the commerce clause to justify the mandate to be unconstitutional. So he rewrote the bill to save the bill, calling the mandate a tax. I guess we can all agree that anyone can be bludgeoned to do anything with a tax. Mission accomplished:
The Wall Street Journal is not so easily impressed. Its editorial today notes references to Justice Ginsberg’s “dissent”. Why would she dissent if she was in the majority, unless she wasn’t until Roberts switched sides?
