In all fairness, the Roberts decision has done more than destroyed Obamacare. It also seriously undermines federal power across the board. Several ways of looking at this.
1) An essential element of Obamacare was the destruction of Medicare and Medicaid, which on their own, amount to 23% of the US federal budget (actually more, because due to Obama’s profligate spending, the *percent* of the budget for these has been reduced from close to 40% in just a few years.)
And Medicare and Medicaid, in their current forms, are unsustainable, but politically cannot be reformed, so *have* to be killed off. And Obamacare has done a lot to kill them.
So this means that when the Republicans gut Obamacare, it will still leave a much reduced Medicare and Medicaid, that instead of attempting to rebuild, *might possibly* be reformed. The best way of doing this would be to “de-federalize” them, just giving block grants to the states based on per capita need, with minimal federal oversight.
Importantly, if Republicans do *this*, then they are given a gift with the Roberts decision:
2) If the go the block grant way, it establishes a low baseline for what states have to do, and *anything* else the feds want to add in the future *must* come out of the federal purse alone — because they cannot demand that the states pay for expansions.
Importantly, this applies to other programs the Republicans decide to block grant to the states. This could save the states billions of dollars annually, and make those programs much harder to enlarge.
3) Roberts really had no choice but to vote the way he did. It is likely that Justice Kennedy would have jumped ship to join the majority, approving ALL Obamacare, unless
Roberts did. But, one of the few unique duties of the chief justice is that he has the right to *assign* who will write the majority decision, even if he is not on it.
But if Roberts did vote with the majority, he could assign the majority decision to himself, and he did.
He knew that the liberal justices would *never* vote against Obamacare, no matter what he wrote, as long as Obamacare was upheld. So he included a handful of “poison pills” to the decision, and gave the next congress, likely a Republican one, lots of opportunities to sink Obamacare, as well as neuter a whole bunch of other federal programs.
Is Obamacare Constitutional, or not? Not the bending, twisting and shaping of the situation by Roberts which resulted in the ruling - nor the ruling itself - but the actual truth.
Under the Constitution as written, under any scheme of rationalization, is it Constitutional for the Federal Government to do what it did in Obamacare?
I say no.
Four conservative justices agree with me.
What say you?
All Roberts had to do was agree with them, and the whole thing fails.
Story is he did agree, then backtracked and found a way to uphold it.
I don’t really care that much about what his motive was. It matters some, but what matters to me is whether this monstrosity is in truth allowed under our Constitution.
If I and the four dissenters are right, Roberts made the WRONG call.
That is, if you admit that Roberts was appointed to rule on the literal Constitutional standing of this law, and not to do the various other machinations that he did.
I want you two to defend the Constitutionality of Obamacare.
Have at it.
Or, conversely, admit it is unconstitutional for the Federal Government to do what it did in Obamacare.
I’ve done all I need to do, and all I’m going to spend my time doing, in framing the issue that way.
I will agree with the writings of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy that it is unconstitutional.
They did the work that I now don’t need to do. I refer all Robert’s boosters to THEIR decision.
All Roberts had to do was sign on with them and the whole thing collapses.
And by “thing”, I’m refering to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise dubbed Obamacare.
Bottom line for you two, is it Constitutional?
Roberts aside, is it?
Go for it.