I predict there will be much sadness...
In a sane world, Obamacare wouldn’t have a chance at being upheld. The fact that it might says volumes on what this country has become. The very idea that a govt can force its citizens to buy something is very foreign to our republic and sets a terrible precedence. If they keep the mandate, then what will be next that they will be allowed to force us to buy? Electric cars? Solar Panels for your homes??? Its a horrible slope to go down, today could make that difference.
SCOTUS will strike it down, POTUS will ignore the ruling.
The whole law will get tossed because there is not enough pretzel logic on earth to find the mandate constitutional. And there is no severability clause. And there is no way in hell the Court is going to wade through a 3000 page bill to try and create one.
The result will be much wailing, crying, and stamping of feet, culminating in a long-range Leftist plan to undermine the Supreme Court (an FDR court packing scheme or something similar). It will become the Bush v Gore Bloody Shirt of the next decade.
Electorally though it will actually help Obama, as it will remove a huge unpopular albatross from around his neck. It will also get the Catholic Church to shut up about the mandate and many Catholics will go back to voting Democrat.
I think it’s pathetic that something like this was even sent to SCOTUS. It shouldn’t have passed in the first place. They didn’t even read it before voting. Travesty.
Obama is the most corrupt and UNconstitutional resident we’ve ever had, and his minions are just as bad. I hope it is struck down.
Rhis will be the one and only time I would like to see the look on Pelosid face when obamacare is seruck down. The woman is detestible.
We can, however, comment on the predilections of many of the Justices. Identifying the predilections of the Justices on the left side of the court is easy: the four left-wing justices will work backwards from their ideological worldview and distort the Constitution enough to arrive at the desired predetermined result.
The four conservative Justices will look at the facts and the law and lay them down next to the Constitution and apply their best judgment as to its original intent, having due consideration for precedent to arrive at a finding about constitutionality. The evidence is they will engage in this intellectual exercise honestly and, if the exercise leads them to a conclusion unfavorable to a conservative worldview, they will nevertheless so hold. In this respect their intellectual honesty distinguishes them from the left wing judges.
The last Justice, Justice Kennedy, is conventionally believed to be intellectually honest but intellectually and ideologically incoherent. That is, he is not dishonest as are the four ideologically driven left-wingers but he is utterly eclectic and vulnerable to the temptation to seize upon ad hoc fixes. Thus he becomes at once the swing justice and the justice most difficult to pigeonhole which means the Justice most difficult to predict.
A quick word about the law, no one can say that the individual mandate is constitutional if viewed in the context of original intent. On the other hand, no intellectually honest person can say that the individual mandate is necessarily unconstitutional if it is judged according to its place in the stream of precedents.
It is the tragedy of this process that the left has so politicized our jurisprudence that it is come down to the selection of Justices rather than the meaning of the Constitution. It is a pity that conservatives enter this fray handicapped by their own naïveté, a naïve belief in the rule of law and the original meaning of the Constitution. Thus, we take an intellectual knife to a gunfight with liberals who are in no wise inhibited in their remorseless quest for power by scruples over the meaning of the Constitution, the rule of law, or stare decisis.
