Free Republic

Via the Examiner, I’ve been looking for tea leaves for you all day but this, unfortunately, is the best I can do. I don’t even regard it as tea leaves: I think Tribe is just pre-spinning the outcome so that, if the mandate is struck down, he can call Roberts a disappointment who betrayed his education in a fit of ideological pique, etc etc etc. But we’re starving for insight and this is, in its own lame way, an insight into Roberts’s thinking. As is this: Eastman, a critic of the health care law, said he wouldn’t be surprised to...

Romney Rakes in More Than $1 Million Since ObamaCare Ruling

I am not voting for Romney, though I understand those who are. That said, NOW is the time to change his phrasing from "I will work to repeal and replace Obamacare from Day One" (which means nothing) to actions more specific than merely agreeing to sign off on a passed bill that repeals Obamacare. Example of rhetoric, "You want executive orders, Mr. President? You've got'em. #1. The Sebellius rule manadating abortion and birth control coverage is Gone-zo. #2. Anyone who wants a waiver has got one. (credit to rottndog) #3. The centralized database is suspended, so we can prioritize those...

Everyone needs to step back and actually look at the decision the Supreme Court made about Obamacare before doing anything. From the majority opinion: “The Affordable Care Act is constitutional in part and unconstitutional in part …” This clearly shows that the Court is saying there are issues with the law.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, was in the last minutes of a meeting with her leadership lieutenants at the Capitol when she learned of the court’s ruling and returned to her office to make phone calls. She had to leave messages for President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but she connected with Vicki Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted Kennedy, the Senate sponsor of the health care legislation, who died before the legislation passed. “Now Teddy can rest,” Mrs. Pelosi said, according to a Congressional aide.

This video is worth re-visiting. It opens ironically with Chief Justice Roberts swearing in Obama in 2009.

Supreme Court's Obamacare decision hands federal government unlimited power to force you to spend 100% of your paycheck on things you don't even want by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor Regardless of whether you agree with the fundamentals of Obamacare, the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled the federal government has the power to tax Americans into mandatory purchases of private industry products means an end to economic freedom in America. Why? Because it hands the federal government the power to force the American people to buy anything the government wants or face tax penalties...

From Dictionary.com... tax   [taks] noun 1. a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc. We have property taxes on property, sales taxes on commerce, income taxes on income, inheritance taxes on wealth transfer... essentially, we have taxes on things of value, commerce, or the transfer of wealth. Until now. What is being taxed in Obamacare? Citizenship.

What say you to the king? He deemeth that thou shalt buy insurance, or face the wrath of a dictator scorn. You ready to stand on your feet? Or are you living on your knees?

...Roberts’s historic hand on the scale Thursday was the only way to preserve a central role for private insurers in American health care in the years ahead. In this sense, Roberts’ epic choice is therefore not only small “c” conservative as a matter of judicial temperament but economically conservative to boot. What the chief justice has done is nothing less than save shortsighted partisans bent on overturning Obamacare from themselves. As I and others have long argued, a successful drive to overturn the Affordable Care Act, combined with a continued surge in the ranks of the uninsured, would almost certainly...

The chief justice’s canny move to uphold the Affordable Care Act while gutting the Commerce Clause. The scholars expected to see the court gut existing Commerce Clause ... Roberts was smarter than that. By ruling that the individual mandate was permissible as a tax, he joined the Democratic appointees to uphold the law—while joining the Republican wing to gut the Commerce Clause (and push back against the necessary-and-proper clause as well). Here's the Chief Justice's opinion (italics in original): Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and...

If it was about anything else before, it is about Obamacare now. We have seen what happens in an election centered around Obamacare. It is not pretty for Dems. If SCOTUS had struck it down today, it would have defanged this issue, and de-energized some of the GOP and Independents who united against this in 2009-2010. Some Independents who have been uncomfortable with being associated with GOP candidates are re-energized and re-united over this issue. What will be fascinating is seeing his whole party run away from him on this issue. We may pick up another 30 seats in the...

As everyone knows, who cares, Obamacare was upheld today. The purported conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, writing for the majority ruled the health insurance mandate was legal, in spite of arguments before the Court, stating that if the government can force you to buy insurance, they can force you to eat broccoli as well. Because after all, it is good for you. We've stated many times on the Financial Survival Network, that any time you go to court, it's a "crap-shoot." And this time was no different. And while we admit to being surprised, based upon the oral arguments presented,...

"We need answers on this. Not defensive BS. Real answers." In email exchanges with subordinates in February and March 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder and the department's second-highest official expressed growing concern that something might have gone wrong in a federal gun-smuggling probe called Operation Fast and Furious. Two of Holder's emails and one by Deputy Attorney General James Cole were among documents the Justice Department showed Tuesday to Republican and Democratic staffers of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee in an effort to ward off a criminal contempt vote against the attorney general. The full contents of the...

Nowhere is political rhetoric more shameless — or more dangerous — than in the pious names that politicians give to the legislation they pass. Perhaps the most egregious example is the so-called "Indian Child Welfare Act," which callously sacrifices the welfare of Indian children. Time and again, children with some American Indian ancestry, who have been adopted by families that are not of that ancestry, have been suddenly taken by law from the only parents they have ever known and transferred to some distant Indian reservation, to live among strangers in a world they know nothing about. You might...

...Today’s holding is problematic for many reasons. First, it is a novel holding that threatens to expand the taxing power extensively. It removes the taxing power from the representative branches and places it in the only non-accountable branch, the judiciary. Defenders of the law — from President Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Harry Reid — all insisted that the law they voted for was not a tax. Now, when it is off their desk, the court has retroactively declared it a tax, circumventing the public accountability intended by the Founders and recognized by constitutional law as the major check on...

Two big economic indicators got released by the government today, including the final estimate of gross domestic product in Q1 of this year. The annualized GDP rate remained unchanged from the second (interim) estimate at 1.9%, well below 2011Q4′s 3.0%: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States --- increased at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2012 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "third" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the...

An unappreciated point about today’s Supreme Court ruling is that it will have significant consequences for the federal deficit. It all comes out of the Court’s opinion that states have the ability to opt out of Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid. Paradoxically, this decision by the Court could lead to dramatically higher government health-care spending. Here’s why. The Affordable Care Act, as passed, expanded Medicaid to cover all adults below 138 percent of the federal poverty level (100 percent of FPL is $23,050 for a family of four). In addition, the law created state-based exchanges, which sell subsidized private insurance, for...

Today is just an awful day. If Bush-appointed Justice Roberts had only voted with the rest of the conservatives, we would have been rid of all of Obamacare, not just the mandate, as their dissenting opinion implies. Once again, decisions that George W. Bush are turning out to be disastrous for those of us who believe in individual liberty and limited government.  Let's just do a quick run down shall we? Appointed Ben Bernanke to be Fed Chair.  How he could appoint the guy who actually hired Paul Krugman at Princeton to run our money supply is beyond me.  Bernanke...