You can tell the Swamp, GOPe and left leaning republicans are pulling out the stops to get another Souter on the court.
Did Kavanaugh really pave the way for Obamacare to pass legal muster?
The allegation from conservative critics is rooted in a 2011 ObamaCare case where Kavanaugh dissented against the ruling but acknowledged that the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate provision” could fit “comfortably within Congress’ Taxing Clause power.
Why would Trump venture that kind of gamble?
Kavanaugh is a typical Republican betrayer.
Why would Trump venture that kind of gamble?
It doesn't sound like a gamble at all. I agree with what Kavanaugh wrote, and I've said so here on FR for years.
ObamaCare is an unconstitutional disaster on any number of grounds, but the case against the individual mandate is probably the weakest argument of them all.
I would put this decision -- along with Chief Justice Roberts' decision in the landmark case that "upheld ObamaCare" (what it really upheld was just the individual mandate) -- in the category of: "Supreme Court decisions where I don't like the result but I agree with the constitutional decision."
Sometimes that happens, even if we HATE the result. There was a similar one in the recent decisions handed down by the Supreme Court -- where Clarence Thomas actually sided with the liberal dissenters in the Carpenter v. United States case. The Court decided that cell phone records owned and held by a third party were protected by the Fourth Amendment. Thomas dissented, and I agreed with his dissent.
These cases demonstrate an important difference between an "originalist" and a "textualist" on the U.S. Supreme Court. An originalist looks at the facts of a case and says: "What would the Founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution think about this?" A textualist looks at the facts of a case and says: "What does the U.S. Constitution say explicitly, and how would it apply to this?"
Antonin Scalia was an originalist. Clarence Thomas is a textualist. Both of them are among the most conservative Supreme Court justices this country has ever had ... and yet in some cases they aren't on the same side at all.