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U.S. Constitution Title: Roberts the Swing Vote: Court Upholds Most of Health Care On the last possible day, the Supreme Court upheld most of the Affordable Care Act. (Heres a pdf of the opinion.) Who won, then? John Roberts, the Chief Justice, who put himself in the majority with the Courts four liberals, and may have changed the definition of what we call the Roberts Court; President Barack Obama, whose first term was defined by it; our sense of how the balance of powers ought to work, and against, perhaps, our growing cynicism about the Courts politicization (although there is a fine line between cynicism and simple prudence). A conservative court, and a conservative justice, upheld a law passed and treasured by liberals. This is not the way the Court has worked in recent years, for either side. The Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act, according to the majority opinion, written by Roberts. No one asked it to. But, really, the winners are Americansthe more than fifty million of them who dont have health insurance, but also the rest. Income and well-being have increasingly come to define each other; this is a victory for our sense of fairness, and that there need not be two Americasone where, say, a mother can get good prenatal care and a cancer patient has choices, and another where pregnant women show up at emergency rooms, preëxisting conditions can be a death sentence, and medical costs are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy and foreclosure. It wont be immediate. This is a major step toward American fairness. The money quote in the decision, as SCOTUSblog, the most reliable breaking-news source, put it, was that the individual mandate need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it. Roberts added that it did not matter that the law described this as a penalty, not a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness. In other words, the image of shadowy enforcers making children eat broccoli was always a delusion. If you dont buy insurance, you pay a tax, and there are appropriate penalties for evading one of those, as there are for evading any payment that has a chance of keeping the country safe and connected, and making it betterand, whether Roberts thinks it does or not, wiser and fairer. Again, the swing vote, on the main points, is Roberts. Anthony Kennedy wrote in a dissent that we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. Roberts was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer. They believedas Roberts did notthat the A.C.A. was constitutional thanks to the Commerce Clause, without any talk of taxes. This did not, then, turn out to be a defining case on the expansion of the Commerce Clause, but it didnt have to be. It will, though, be interesting to see if any of Robertss language about the Commerce Clause is actually read as limiting it in other cases, and if the price of upholding the A.C.A. turns out to be significant in other areas. Justice Ginsburg seems to think it may, calling it a novel constraint on Congress commerce power: Stunningly retrogressive is not the phrase most people are using this morning to describe Robertss opinion; he is being celebrated as a moderate, called a disappointment to conservatives. But Ginsburgs caution is worth watching. On other issues, the Court did limit the expansion of Medicaidthis had to do with what the states could be made to pay. The Roberts opinion found that they couldnt lose the federal money they got according to the pre-A.C.A. contours of Medicaid if they did not want to participate in the expansion. It is telling, and a sign that we dont have an entirely new Chief Justice here, that the decisive point for Roberts was that the expansion accomplishes a shift in kind, not merely degree, and transformed [it] into a program to meet the health care needs of the entire nonelderly population with income below 133 percent of the poverty level. States, he believed, could opt out of that sort of thing without paying any cost. One of the great questions of the next few weeks, and years, will be this: Who is John Roberts? In one passage from his Profile of the Chief Justice, Jeffrey Toobin wrote, Where does this decision fit in? Whose power, in this case and in others, does Roberts most value? For the moment, the answer to the question about the Chief Justice is simple: John Roberts is the switch in time that saved nine for our eraand the vote that saved Obamas great achievement, if not his Presidency. But that, again, is just for the moment. Poster Comment: I didn't see that one coming. Cost me $20 in a lost bet :(
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Gun control care for the masses ! The criminals go free !
If you ... don't use exclamation points --- you should't be typeing ! Commas - semicolons - question marks are for girlie boys !
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