Nail Meet Gavel!
Posted on 12/24/2019 12:44:43 PM PST by karpov
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or ObamaCare, includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall . . . ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, the individual mandate, after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.”
As of January, thanks to a tax reform bill that Congress enacted in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero. Consequently, a federal appeals court ruled last week, the mandate that became a tax is now a mandate again and therefore unconstitutional, a decision that is simultaneously logical and puzzling, revealing the triumph of form over substance in the judicial branch’s failure to stop Congress from exercising powers it was never granted.
In the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, five justices agreed that forcing people to buy health insurance was not a legitimate exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce, which has long been the favorite excuse for federal legislation that the Constitution otherwise doesn’t seem to authorize. But Roberts was determined to save the individual mandate anyway, so he reinterpreted it as a tax, contrary to what he called the “most straightforward” and “most natural” understanding of the law, and joined four other justices in upholding the provision.
Explaining the danger of reading the Commerce Clause broadly enough to encompass a command to buy health insurance, Roberts observed that the clause “gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Roberts will be neutered when RBG expires.
Proof that even the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS cannot be trusted.
Roberts is already neutered. Soy boy toy for the luciferian pedovore globalists.
Can he be replaced, or is his Chief Justice status as protected as his justice seat on the bench is?
He definitely needs a demotion.
Stuck with him.
The CJ slot isn’t all that meaningful, according to my understanding. He can assign the opinion for whatever side he’s on, so in a lost cause he might vote counter to his preference and assign himself the opinion to limit the damage, but other than that the unique power of the CJ is pretty minimal, so I’ve read.
With the mandate gone there is no reason to believe that the Supreme Court won’t strike down Obamacare when they rule on Texas v. U.S. next June. So pre-existing coverage will be gone, no cap on coverage will be gone, coverage for adult dependents will be gone, subsidies will be gone, all the rest will be gone less than five months before the election. The GOP had better have a response ready.
he can be impeached and removed just as any member of the judiciary can be, remember Al Hastings?
remember, the CJ also is the FISA court's overlord. We now know how much chaos that court can unleash when it isn't supervised properly. Thanks Roberts, you jackass.
Unbelievably convoluted reasoning to get there but right result in the end.
Nail Meet Gavel!
My view of the individual mandate has always been that if it were indeed constitutional then it would mean that congress could require all Americans to buy a quart of buttermilk every Friday if they wished. That is an INTENTIONALLY absurd example but really, what is the difference between requiring someone to buy health insurance and requiring the same person to buy buttermilk? I maintain that one is no more absurd than the other.
Barack and Moochie need a yard boy at their $14 million dollar Martha's Vineyard estate.
He'd be a good fit because he is already accustomed to serving Barack.
.
Thanks. That would have been my guess. Too bad really...
Thanks for your thoughts on that.
No, I do not remember Hastings. Thanks for the mention.
“The GOP had better have a response ready.”
They probably will and it is likely to be as absurd as Obamacare except for different reasons. I wish that people could understand that health care would be far, far less expensive if the government would get out of the business and leave it to those who know what they are doing.
Can’t argue with that.
This is another fine mess Bush got us into.
You make my point for me. There is really no way of justifying the constitutionality of Obamacare, not now and not ever. So I expect the Supreme Court to strike it down in June. Then what?
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