And this from a USA today source: “Ginsburg asked whether the mandate was necessary to keep the uninsured from passing off the costs of their health care on others. “It’s not your free choice just to do something for yourself. What you do is going to affect others, affect them in very negative ways,” she said.
“You could say the same thing about not buying cars,” Scalia replied.
[what a maroon she is ]
My question: is Obamacare dead without the mandate? I’m not so sure.
“If the government can do this, what else can it … do,” Scalia asked?
See commerce clause. Yes they can and did.
The better question would have been “If the government can do this, what can't it do?”
It should be 9-0 in a normal world but leftists don’t live in our reality. Everything is politics to the left, everything. These leftist judges would decide the Constitution is unconstitutional if they could get away with it.
Yeah, until Sandra Day O’Connor gives him a call or he hears from one of his foreign pals.
8-1 overturning the mandate, 5-4 killing the entire beast, is about the best outcome that can be imagined here.
Reading about this in the IBD this morning,
it appears this “limiting clause”
simply means -
“how can we allow this particular instance pass constitutional muster without saying that everything is allowed?”
Jefferson, that great intellectual who was chosen to write a people's Declaration of Independence from a government which assumed powers to spend, tax, and overpower citizens, in his "Notes on Religion," made an observation which, while it was directed toward oppressive ecclesiastical rules, seems to be pertinent to the current matter involving coercive government "rules":
"Notes on Religion, 1776 (Ford 2: 252-68)
"The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or estate, which more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he shall not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills…"
Apparently, "progressives" believe they should, and therein lies a great disparity between the Founders' ideas of liberty for individuals and the so-called "progressives'" ideas of rule and control over individuals. No wonder the President views the Constitution as a document of "negative liberties." In order to fulfill the goals of its Preamble, it does place a negative on unlimited coercive government power.
I wonder how these observations of a Justice’s questions/demeanor/reaction actually play out? I never have had the discipline to see a decision and then go back and see if there was any reaction to a particular Justice’s questioning.
I doubt many others have, either...but...if anyone out there has any experience or knowledge of how predictive the questioning is, that would be interesting to know at this stage.
Kennedy may see the problem, but may decide to solve the problem but creating an arbitrary carve out exception specifically for healthcare. That’s just how he rolls. If I had to guess, I’d say that after his leftie friends spend the next month or 2 hammering away at him, he’ll create a “compromise” where he finds that the government can only do this under these particular circumstances. He’s not afraid to manufacture his own “limiting principle” out of whole cloth. Of course, when he’s gone, so is the “principle”, but he doesn’t think that far ahead.
But, but, but I was looking forward to being FORCED to buy an online class on race relations put out by the New Black Panthers...
It means nothing and just gives cover to the pusillanimity of the judiciary
.
One good thing we have going for us is that the looney left Justices may actually want to do what is right just before retiring, so as to have something laudible to be remembered for, like dumping the whole thing as unConstitutional.