Winning!?!

Two columns at the Times engage in a bit of hand-wringing about Obama's healthcare "victory".

James Stewart:

In Obama’s Victory, a Loss for Congress

With the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, conservatives and libertarians lost their legal battle to overturn the Obama administration’s signature health care legislation. But they may have won a bigger war.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled that the health care legislation passed constitutional muster, but only under Congress’s broad power to tax. He rejected the widely held expansive view of the commerce clause of the United States Constitution, ruling that it doesn’t give Congress the power to make people buy health insurance — or, for that matter, healthy green vegetables like broccoli.

“Under the government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables,” the chief justice wrote. “That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned.”

Libertarians declared victory.  “We finally won a three-decades-long battle over the commerce clause,” John Eastman, a conservative constitutional scholar and a professor at Chapman University, told me hours after the court’s decision.

Neil Katyal:

A Pyrrhic Victory

THE obvious victor in the Supreme Court’s health care decision was President Obama, who risked vast amounts of political capital to pass the Affordable Care Act. A somewhat more subtle victor, but equally important, was the rule of law more generally: in an era when so many people on the left and right view the justices, and constitutional questions, through the prism of politics, the court today made clear that law matters and that it isn’t just politics by other means.

But there was a subtle loser too, and that is the federal government. By opening new avenues for the courts to rewrite the law, the federal government may have won the battle but lost the war.

The former Solicitor General and Gore advisor concludes with this punchline:

Time will tell whether today’s decision foreshadows things to come. But one thing is apparent: Americans are growing increasingly comfortable, if not always happy, with the idea of nine men and women in Washington handing down rulings that remove decisions from the legislative process or even rewrite legislation altogether.

Uh huh. And when those decisions relate to gay marriage or abortion, they are met with 'huzzas' from the left.

 

 

Comments

[Elliott]

Good morning, JMH.

[AliceH]

DrJ and Sara: Thank you for the multi-part answers. Each bit is helpful.

[peter]

Daddy, I heard that Kudlow show yesterday while driving. Kudlow used a great expression--Roberts was "Mau-maued" by the press. So true. He thought he could feed the crocodile of the MSM. He didn't. Hope while he's vacationing in Malta, he gets a chance to read this editorial from the Slimes today-- LUN
for those of you who don't want to click onto Carlos Slim's paper here is the money quote:

It is no wonder that the court’s standing in public opinion polls is at its lowest level in a quarter of a century, with just one in eight Americans believing that the justices decide cases based only on legal analysis.

Justice Elena Kagan said last month, dissenting in the crime lab evidence case, that the conservative majority sometimes forsakes “precedent-based decision making,” which guides lower court judges and provides predictability in the justice system. The court reached the right result on the Affordable Care Act, but that ruling was not a sign of change in a strident conservative majority.

(end quote)

Got that? Roberts, you're still part of the "strident" conservative majority despite caving on the biggest case in your tenure.

[centralcal]

Bummer. Sunday morning and no Clarice's Pieces since it published on Friday instead. Pretty savvy of Clarice to leave DC during the epic heatwave and power outages. Glad to hear Janet is surviving! Any other JOMers from that area checking in?

[Chubby]

((“In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.”--Jeffrey Toobin)) Sept. 2011

[JM Hanes]

Mornin' Elliott.

[Chubby]

I don't care how smart Elena Kagan is, any "judge" who could think or write garbage like that is an intellectually debauched MORON and IDIOT.

[Neo]

Still looking for a silver lining in the ObamaCare decision ?

Given that the SCOTUS declared a monetary "penalty" to be a tax, I guess now I can deduct traffic and parking tickets under "Taxes other."

Got fined by the EPA, FTC, FCC, SEC ... deduct it .. they are now taxes
Got a penalty for early withdraw of 401(k) funds ... deduct it .. they are now taxes

[JM Hanes]

Chubby:

Add speak to think & write.

Kagan sounded like an idiot more than once during oral arguments. It's funny that the pre-nomination chattering classes were much more impressed by her than by Sotomayor. While the wise Latina may be reliably liberal, I was pleasantly surprised by her questions, which were on point, and her clarity on the central issues in question. Before the ruling came down, I thought it would be nice to think that maybe we had more than one potential swing voter on the bench. Never thought it would be the Chief on this one, though. But then rumor has it that he didn't know either.

[mockmook]

Chaco,

Roe v Wade was a State issue (or should have remained one). Had absolutely nothing to do with Federal power.

So, you support Roberts inventing things like "penumbras"?

-----

ACA is now constitutional as a tax, that's new--no conservative thought you could shoehorn in un-constitutional laws just by calling them a tax.

[Jim,MtnView,Ca,USA]

"Bork was an early heads up on just how deep in the muck the left was willing to go to destroy a good man. And how the MFM would enable them"
Is it fair to say that some on the right excused them? I've read punditry along the lines of 'well, he WAS kind of extreme'

[Carol Herman]

The year was 1934. Justice Harlan Stone (at a dinner party), met Frances Perkins. When she asked how FDR could "raise a safety net" ... which becomes Social Secutiry ... Harlan Stone told her THE TAXING POWERS.

That's how you raise the money.

The Conservative Supreme Court then guaranteed they wouldn't even review the law.

When you own the TAXING POWERS everything is within reach.

Oh. And, if Obama wins? He starts 2013 with a trillion dollar windfall. That's what will get raised by applying this tax across all 50 states. One way. Or another.

Where I just kept wondering where he'd get any money from.

[MarkD]

Americans still hate this law. They are hardly "comfortable" with nine unelected people making the decisions that count.

Roberts is now a synonym for pussy.