Actually, Justice Roberts Demolished Obama In His Supreme Court Ruling

Business Insider ^ | Jun. 28, 2012, | Grace Wyler

[little jeremiah]

....But while Roberts may have saved Obama's signature domestic legislation — and perhaps his reelection campaign — by siding with the court's liberal wing, he actually did it in spite of Obama, not because of him.

Roberts' opened his opinion today by declaring, unequivocally, that the individual mandate — which requires people to buy insurance or pay a penalty — is not constitutional under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. It's a direct shot at the Obama administration's defense of the law's constitutionality, which largely relied on those two clauses, which give Congress the power to regulate commerce and to enact provisions that are necessary to carry out its laws, respectively.

snip

[P-Marlowe]

The term “Occam’s Razor” definitely comes to mind here.

Either Roberts was a closet anti-Constitutional socialist or someone has pictures of him with a dead woman or a live boy.

I would suspect that the answer is behind door number 3.

[vpintheak]

BS, there is no defending it. It could have been and should have been killed in its entirety. Period. Anything else is a lie. America has been betrayed again.

[Varsity Flight]

“Who cares? By opening the TAX clause he made it worse.
Even Pandora’s box isn’t this bad.”

And it was declared that all the world be taxed....

Preparing for the Lion, and the next Advent.
“He whom the Son sets free is free indeed.”

[little jeremiah]

My very first thought after I read that comment. How could anyone trust a leftist POS?

[little jeremiah]

I would think so.

[kingu]

“Who cares? By opening the TAX clause he made it worse. Even Pandora’s box isn’t this bad.” And it was declared that all the world be taxed....

The thing is, American people understand a tax. They understand it very well. It's the reason why liberals were so desperately clear in making sure everyone knew this wasn't a tax. And now it comes back at them as a tax. A tax on breathing, on being a person. To the most liberal, eh, who cares. To the rest of America; you just taxed the heck out of me? Here's the door!

[Kegger]

Because of Roberts, will ObamaCare be the law for years to come? YES (good luck repealing it, dem's will forever filibuster any repeal attempt)


Since it is now construed as a tax, couldn't it be brought up under a budget bill immune from the filibuster?

[little jeremiah]

Oh, I’m not defending Roberts at all. I’ve wanted to puke all day. I just happened to see this and thought it might make sense; I can’t understand any legalese or governmentese or SCOTUSese. If Roberts is smart and all that good stuff and not a leftist, I see no reason why he couldn’t have voted with Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy.

[sonic109]

Roberts has stabbed America in the back . Revolution time is here ..I REFUSE TO PLAY ALONG

[P-Marlowe]

I think I know little jeremiah well enough to know that it's not a case of carrying water, it's a case of trying to make some sense out of something that makes no sense.

Occam's Razor.

Did Robert's vote on the Arizona case make any more sense than this?

Roberts is either a liar and phoney who was never a conservative or he has been compromised. His opinion in this case is not even readable. It is violently incomprehensible. It is the worst piece of legal reasoning I have ever tried to read and I could not get through it.

So what do you think it was? A dead woman or a live boy?

[Leaning Right]

Here are my contributions:

Actually, that charging lion wants to be your friend.

Actually, those new federal regulations will make your life easier.

[little jeremiah]

Whatever Roberts did, or for whatever reason/s, I hate.

[NVDave]

Sorry, no sale here either.

The thing that is most infuriating about this decisions is this: The Obama administration explicitly argued that this was NOT A TAX.

The other eight justices were ready to decide this case up or down based on the arguments made by both parties to the case - the states and the US Government/Obama administration. This was an up/down case on whether the Congress, invoking the Commerce Clause, could *force* you into doing commerce where you had been doing none before and had no intention otherwise of conducting commerce.

It was that simple: Could Congress force you to buy a product you didn’t want to buy for the simple reason that you were in the US and under the jurisdiction of the US?

And Roberts blew this simple question. He made an argument that the Obama administration explicitly denied they were making. Where did he get the right or power to do that? I have no idea.

Moreover, he’s a moron for decided that this was a tax. The legislation doesn’t impose a tax - it does impose a penalty for not carrying or obtaining insurance from some provider. The mandate is to buy the private insurance, not to pay the penalty. The penalty is conditional upon ignoring the mandate. The problem was always the mandated commerce.

Only a bunch of Ivy League graduates could take such a simple question and make it so complicated. Roberts, as we’ve now seen, is about as bad as Souter was.

Thanks to Bush, we have this idiot as the CJ of the SCOTUS for a long time to come...

[Brad from Tennessee]

Roberts also ruled that the states can opt out of the Medicaid expansion portion of the law without penalty. ObamaCare would have withdrawn all Medicaid funding from states who did not expand their program. Expanded Medicaid, covering about 20 million new clients nationwide, would have been federally funded the first two years after which the states would fund most of it. Roberts said the government could not coerce the states by threatening to defund their existing Medicaid systems. This means in a state that opts out of expanded Medicaid—maybe as many as 26 states—the new clients who would have been covered are moved over to that state's insurance exchange program. Since these new clients can't afford insurance the cost of their policies will have to be subsidized by ObamaCare. This upsets the whole funding formula. People who live in states with expanded Medicaid will be footing the bill for people in states that have opted out of expanded Medicaid. This disparity would encourage more and more states to opt out and ObamaCare goes broke without a new funding source.

That's the Trojan Horse.

[free me]

Okay now that was funny and true!

Well said.

[Obama_Is_Sabotaging_America]

The only thing Roberts demolished was America. He gets the finest health care in the world so WTF does he care? I hope all his close friends and family abandon him for abandoning America. He deserves it. Our Forefathers would’ve wished him worse.

[little jeremiah]

Maybe this - epilepsy meds, and a comment about an investigation into his kids’ being adopted perhaps illegally or irregularly:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2900740/posts?page=4#19

[sickoflibs]

Ideally Roberts would have sided with Scalia but the lame Obama personal mandate which has little power to do anything to anyone or force anyone (Republican hype misses this completely) is not that much different than the way congress uses the tax code to bribe us with our own money.

My expectations were very reserved on this decision and I am not getting bent out of shape on it.

Republicans got so hung up on the powerless personal mandate that they ignore that a more serious part of the bill was thrown out, the medicaid mandates on the states.

Hopefully the whine-fest will die out in a day or two.

[little jeremiah]

At this point I have no hope for the Republic without - well, re-set and start over.