Posted on 07/01/2012 4:12:25 PM PDT by centurion316
The Supreme Court’s health-care ruling is welcome because it is a compromise. The justices overcame their differences, defusing political conflict and channeling it into the election where it belongs.
But the ruling is historic because it is a Compromise — a crisis-averting pact across lines of ideology, party and region, the likes of which we have not seen since pre-Civil War days.
Four of the court’s five Republican-appointed conservatives wanted to strike down the Democratic Party’s most cherished legislative achievement since the Great Society, dealing an election-year political blow to President Obama.
Their legal arguments were hardly specious, but they were novel enough to be plausibly branded partisan and opportunistic — possibly in a dissenting opinion by four liberal Democratic appointees on the court that would have become a de facto Obama campaign manifesto.
For Chief Justice John Roberts, the temptation to join the other four GOP appointees, consequences be damned, must have been strong. Surely this lifelong conservative has little use for “Obamacare.”
Yet he is also a student of history, especially pre-Civil War America; his intellectual biography of Daniel Webster won Harvard’s undergraduate writing prize in 1976. ...
Roberts grasped two realities. First: In a great national debate, no side has a monopoly on wisdom. Second: Conservatism has no future if the country slides into division and dysfunction.
And so, instead of standing on the legal principles articulated by his conservative brethren, Roberts sacrificed some of those precepts and persuaded some court liberals to reciprocate.
This was no capitulation. Roberts dealt from strength, holding four aces named Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
What emerged was less a legal opinion than a plan for national cohesion, on terms remarkably favorable to conservatives.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
An interesting aside is that Chief Justice Taney worked the politics behind the scenes very hard to line up support from the other Justices and then wrote the decision himself.
“Division and dysfunction” that was promoted by communist agitators.
They always figure that compromise is us giving into them. Well getting between me and my doctor is going wayy too far and it’s now literally a matter of life and death. There are a lot of ways to solve our health care issues other than seizing control of the entire system a la the UK but the communists just can’t help themselves.
That is friggin’ awesome!
Thanks for posting.
So right. This country passed dysfunction junction a ways back. Its going to be a miracle if Roberts ruling doesn’t start CWII.
The Court has ruled that the Mandate expressed in the ACA is a tax and so as a matter of law that’s what it now is. Note that the President’s minions are supporting your argument, they are insisting that it is still a mandate.
People don’t really understand mandates, but they do understand taxes and they don’t like them very much. The Administration’s worst nightmare is that Obamacare be perceived to be the gigantic tax increase that it really is.
This issue will not be resolved in the courts, it will be resolved at the ballot box.
Huh? Roberts did not convince a single liberal justice that the Commerce Clause limits government power.
The liberals took his bizarre "tax" opinion upholding ObamaCare as a surprise gift, kicked him in the balls, laughed and went on their way thinking to themselves what a fool that man was.
Actually it does NOT "cap that font of federal power."
Roberts screwed the pooch on this.
Had he voted WITH the 4 conservatives to strike down ObamaCare as a violation of the Commerce Clause, then this decision would be binding precedent for the holding limiting the power of government under the Commerce Clause.
But as Ginsburg points out in her dissent, by deciding to uphold ObamaCare as a valid "tax," Roberts' long discussion of the Commerce Clause is beside the point. As far as legal precedent goes, Roberts could just as well have omitted that discussion entirely.
The liberal justices can take the position that because Roberts found a ground on which the tax can stand, his discussion of other grounds that might or might not trouble him is irrelevant and just blowing wind. It is, in legal terms, dicta, and therefore not binding precedent.
So if we get a 5-4 liberal court, the court does not even have to make a naked move to overrule binding Commerce Clause precedent in order to give the government unlimited power.
The liberals will simply point out that Roberts' bloviating on the Commerce Clause in the ObamaCare decision was just dicta and is not binding precedent.
That's what I'm afraid of.
Roger Taney was worried about the potential of war over slavery, so (he imagined) he would settle the issue once and for all, by opining that "a negro has no rights that any white man is bound to respect".
Similarly, John Roberts, fearful of conflict over our steady march to socialism, believes that he has settled the matter by opining that the written Constitution provides no protection to any man who opposes the march of progressivism, and that the plain words of a statute can and will be construed to mean something else if the plain words disadvantage progressives.
But, as was true of Dred Scott, the decision leaves the majority no way out through republican processes.
I wonder if Roberts can hear the distant thunder all the way to Malta?
Indeed; I actually would not be surprised if it did though.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John AdamsAs the above quote so deftly puts it, facts are facts. We now have the court telling us that something so factually inconsistent with the constitution is consistent that all but the most irrational of minds must see it. (The decision itself is internally inconsistent, one minute it's a tax, wait no it's a penalty.)
IOW, Chief Justice Roberts is saying: we can alter facts!
And this is a good idea because we lost how many men in the Civil War?
@ Brief for Respondents on Severability
Sorry about the all caps. I used copy and paste and that's how it came up.
Sorry about not pinging you as well. See reply 33.
Ping to 33.
During the primaries, Barbara Bush chastised conservatives for considering “compromise” a dirty word.
Compromising with evil only benefits evil.
Me - Perhaps after you read this you might change your tune... THE ACT ALSO ESTABLISHES NEW TAX PENALTIES
aruanan - When you fail to pay a tax to the IRS and they assess you a penalty, that penalty is not a tax.
I know. Now think about what you just said. The ordering of the individual mandate was, in and of itself, actually the imposition of a tax after all and it was so from the start and the government knew it while lying to everybody about it!
The penalty isn't the tax, as you note, the individual mandate itself is the actual tax the penalty was imposed upon.
Failure to comply with the tax (the individual mandate) triggers the penalty.
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