Posted on 07/01/2012 4:55:51 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
The Talk Shows
July 1st, 2012
Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:
FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): White House chief of staff Jack Lew; Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
MEET THE PRESS (NBC): House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California; Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La.; former Gov. Howard Dean, D-Vt.
FACE THE NATION (CBS): House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio; Sens. Chuck U. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; Govs. Martin O'Malley, D-Md.; and Scott Walker, R-Wis.
THIS WEEK (ABC): Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; Lew; Vicki Kennedy, widow of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): Lew; Gov. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo.
If only, Bernard. He didn’t call balls and strikes, he rewrote the law to call a penalty a tax. That’s activism like I’ve never seen (or can remember at this point).
To rub salt into the wound for those of us who still love this country and want the Constitution upheld....what does he do? He blames us for electing these morons.
I’m sorry, I didn’t elect them. I was counting on the Supreme Court to uphold the Consitituion regardless of what the other branches did.
That’s his job.
Instead, he trashed the Constitution, betrayed his oath, rewrote law, then blamed eveyone else.
The guy deserves no respect. He should resign.
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Plaintiffs-Discuss-Their-Reactions-to-Health-Care-Decision/10737432008/
Certainly food for thought
ObamaCare Ruling: Pure Fraud and No Due Process Some excerpts:
The assessment charged for failure to comply with ObamaCare’s “individual mandate,” which requires Americans to purchase health insurance, was presented to the country by the administration and the Democratic Congress as a penalty assessed for lawlessness — i.e., for refusing to honor this new legal requirement. It was strenuously denied by proponents that they were raising taxes.
The Obama administration, in particular, was adamant that the assessment was a penalty, not a tax: the president himself indignantly objected to a suggestion to the contrary in an ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos. Obama officials also vigorously maintained that there had been no violation of the president’s oft-repeated campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. Moreover, as stingingly noted in the joint dissenting opinion of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, the Democratic majority in Congress rejected an earlier version of the bill that became ObamaCare precisely because it imposed a tax — lawmakers intentionally substituted a mandate with a penalty for failure to comply so they could continue to contend that no one’s taxes were being raised.
Chief Justice Roberts claims that Congress simply used the wrong label. That is legerdemain. This is not a case in which Congress was confused, or inadvertently used the wrong term under circumstances where the error wasn’t called to its attention. The tax-or-penalty question was a hotly contested issue. As the dissent points out, it is one thing for a court to construe as a tax an exaction that “bore an agnostic label that does not entail the significant constitutional consequences of a penalty — such as ‘license’…. But we have never — never – treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’”
Let’s say that, back when I was a prosecutor, I tried and convicted a man on a charge of conspiring to sell narcotics. I can prove he was conspiring, but it was really to sell stolen property. I convict him but, on appeal, the court holds, “The prosecutor’s evidence that it was drugs the defendant conspired to sell is wholly lacking.” At that point, the conviction has to be dismissed, and if I want to try him a second time, this time for conspiring to sell stolen property, I’ve got to indict him and start the whole process over again.
Let’s suppose, however, that the appeals court instead said, “Eh, drugs, stolen property, what’s the big whup? You just wrote the wrong commodity into the indictment. So let’s not bother with a whole new trial at which you’d have to prove the correct charge to a jury. Let’s just rewrite the indictment and pretend that it says ‘stolen property’ instead of ‘narcotics.’ Then we can uphold the conviction and call it a day.”
That would never be permitted to happen — not even to a crook of whose guilt we were certain. It would be an outrageous violation of due process, a conviction obtained by false pretenses, that would not be allowed to stand.
Yet this is essentially what Chief Justice Roberts & Co. did. They said the American people are not entitled to an honest legislative process, one in which they can safely assume that when Congress intentionally uses words that have very different meanings and consequences — like tax and penalty — and when Congress adamantly insists that the foundation of legislation is one and not the other, the Court will honor, rather than rewrite, the legislative process. Meaning: if Congress was wrong, the resulting law will be struck down, and Congress will be told that, if it wants to pass the law, it has to do it honestly.
Just as an appeals court may not legitimately rewrite an indictment and revise what happened at a trial, neither may it legitimately rewrite a statute and fabricate an imaginary congressional record. But today, the Supreme Court rewrote a law — which it has no constitutional authority to do — and treated it as if it were forthrightly, legitimately enacted. Further, it shielded the political branches from accountability for raising taxes, knowing full well that, had Obama and the Democrats leveled with the public that ObamaCare entailed a huge tax hike, it would never have had the votes to pass."
Roberts’ Dodge at Heart of Obamacare Decision
"Before getting to the heart of the case, the justices first wanted to deal with what seemed to be a side issue: Was the penalty imposed by the individual mandate in Obamacare a tax? If it was, the case would run afoul of a 19th century-law known as the Anti-Injunction Act, which said a tax cannot be challenged in court until someone has actually been forced to pay it. Since the Obamacare mandate wouldn’t go into effect until 2014, that would mean there could be no court case until then.
No one had challenged Obamacare on that basis; the challengers wanted the case to go forward now. The White House, having argued strenuously during the Obamacare debate that the penalty wasn’t a tax, wanted to go ahead as well. So the court, on its own, tapped a Washington attorney to make the argument that the penalty was a tax and therefore the case should not go ahead.
“The Anti-Injunction Act imposes a ‘pay first, litigate later’ rule that is central to federal tax assessment and collection,” said the lawyer, Robert A. Long, on that first day of oral arguments. “The Act applies to essentially every tax penalty in the Internal Revenue Code. There is no reason to think that Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by [Obamacare].”
After Long made his case, it fell to the administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to argue that no, the mandate was not a tax, and therefore the case was not subject to the Anti-Injunction Act.
At the same time, everyone knew that the next day, when Verrilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, he had as a backup the argument that it was also justified by Congress’ power to levy taxes — in other words, that it was a tax.
Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict right away.
“General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax,” Alito said. “Tomorrow you are going to be back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?”
No,” answered Verrilli.
At the time, some observers found the whole thing a little boring; the real action would come the next day, when the court got to the question of whether the Commerce Clause could be stretched to include the individual mandate.
But a lot of those same observers were shocked on Thursday, when Chief Justice John Roberts, rejecting the Commerce Clause argument, agreed with Verrilli that the mandate simultaneously was and was not a tax, and that therefore Obamacare would stand. Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, who seemed prepared to uphold Obamacare under any circumstances.
Roberts’ sleight of hand drove his conservative colleagues nuts. “The government and those who support its position on this point make the remarkable argument that [the mandate] is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax for constitutional purposes,” wrote dissenters Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. “That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”
Good morning! Just got back from mass about an hour ago. I have some random thoughts on the SC ruling, and put them out here for consideration:
1. If the penalty is a tax, then what happens to tax-exempt entities, like the churches?
2. If the penalty is a tax, then how can the president grant waivers?
3. Ran across a liberal colunist this morning who was very concerned about the inability of the government to restrict current Medicaid funds for new requirements. She believed that this negated a big club the feds use when requiring all sorts of things in education, prisons, consumer rights, safety, etc. She read it that they can restrict NEW funds but cannot cut already existing funding. This had her really upset.
4. I think somebody needs to think about the fact that Roberts’ family might have been threatened. I believe he was called to a meeting at the White House last week sometime. He has two children who were adopted from overseas. There is all sorts of opportunity for bureaucratic intimidation with this. I would like to point out that this scenario makes more sense than someone who has long been involved with conservative organizations suddenly becoming interested in cocktail party attendance. It also would explain why this ruling on the surface looks like an Obama win but has hidden minefields for the left.
On my last point, I would like everyone to think about which is more likely: Roberts is a turncoat, or Obama is a thug.
Discuss.
Suppose you had a job making big bucks that only required you to show up and think or talk? Nobody can ever fire you.
Why on earth would you risk it to take some kind of a stand?
"Pat, are we making a profit on those new line of widgets?" the boss asks my accounting self, hired just to answer questions like this. Unlike the Supreme court, I don't have just ONE document to get all close to and friendly like...how easy is that? I got to look at the P&L's, the balance sheet, I got to remember the sales team talking about a big push on the product coming next week. My boss is not asking me the total net profit. He's asking me for input, which is why he pays me the big bucks.
If I make a bad recommendation, in the future it could cost me my job, maybe right away....it's how it is out here in la-la land where we have jobs we can actually lose for poor performance/not doing the job as hired.
Suppose I could just say..."Bob, you could make a lot of bucks on the new line of widgets but you might lose a lot as well."?
I mean, if I could get away with this, and never get fired, why wouldn't I?
Meanwhile the emperor parades down the street, strutting his stuff to the praise of the chattering class. Us boobs who see through it are mocked as not of the august pedigree of their own selves while we are DOUBLE better than them what with having to actually do our jobs with no lifetime guarantee.
I'm serious folks, we are being so bamboozled I'm starting to laff, now that I see through it and everything.
Robert's took that away from him and now He and the Dumocrats are going to have to defend it throughout the fall election process and fight off the Tea Party as well.
Oh well, get out the popcorn, this going to get interesting.
Mumbles McConnell I call him.
He talks like he’s got a mouthful of stones.
Serious, these are our very best Repubs?
I got a bridge to sell.....
Thanks, Fishtalk, for the story about the further adventures of Gerald the Cat!
Well, either she's so brilliant as to be able to publicly abandon any hint of common sense or empathy, and deliberately play the part of a moronic POS, or she isn't.
Looking back at some of the stupid moves she's made, she may well have descended from a long line of intellectual, disingenuous crooks, but I'm not so sure she's a genuine "chip off the old block"....
Know what I mean Vern?
Remembering Trent Lott
It makes you wonder how these guys get elected by their fellow senators
McConnell is a fool. He needs to go as Minority Leader, and he CERTAINLY should not be promoted to Majority Leader if the GOP gains the Senate.
Trent Lott...heh.
His hair was painted on.
Y’all got to stop.
And this is also assuming that the gubmint doesn't pay for an anesthetist.
Keith Olberman -
???? WTF, over? THIS is a newsperson to whom????? ABC, how much are you paying this moron, and with his track record, why?
What worries me about McConnell is that he enjoys the art of a deal. He would never just stomp the dims like they do to the GOP all the time. I just can’t see him leading a bruising repeal fight.
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