Free Republic

Wow. How quickly the press changes their reporting. With the Supreme Court ruling yesterday upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), today's front section of the Detroit Free Press has the following headlines: "Hospital execs promise improved care" "Up to 500,000 more poor people will get coverage in Michigan" "Many find hope in ruling" "Many of law's provisions already proving popular" and a two-thirds page description of the law's consumer protections already in effect and those still to come. I was amazed. Why hadn't I seen such praises of the law before in the Free Press or other big media? How...

Top DNC staffers gloat over Obamacare, taunt GOP ‘bitches,’ ‘mother******s’ Posted at 10:59 am on June 28, 2012 by Twitchy Staff Patrick Gaspard @patrickgaspard "it's constitutional. Bitches."

When is a tax not a tax? When President Obama says it isn't, or when the Supreme Court says it is? Obamacare was sold on several fraudulent lines. The president knows the country doesn't want to pay higher taxes, given the deplorable way their government spends the money. And so the administration packaged it as something different. That's called bait and switch, which is defined as "an illegal tactic in which a seller advertises a product with the intention of persuading customers to purchase a more expensive product." And Obamacare, if it is not repealed, is guaranteed to be more...

The Obama administration on Friday threatened to veto a defense appropriations bill in part because it does not include higher health care fees for members of the military. “The Administration is disappointed that the Congress did not incorporate the requested TRICARE fee initiatives into either the appropriation or authorization legislation,” the White House wrote in an official policy statement expressing opposition to the bill, which the House approved in May. President Obama’s most recent budget proposal includes billions of dollars in higher fees for members of TRICARE, the military health care system, and is part of the administration’s plan to...

Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided that Americans have no right to due process. Indeed, the Court not only upheld a fraud perpetrated on the public — it became a willing participant. 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.

Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada's ghastly "Charter of Rights and Freedoms": "There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself," wrote Jonas. "It's as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them." For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule – until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism...

Conservatives won a substantial victory on Thursday. The physics of American politics — actions provoking reactions — continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John Roberts has served this cause. The health care legislation’s expansion of the federal government’s purview has improved our civic health by rekindling interest in what this expansion threatens — the Framers’ design for limited government. Conservatives distraught about the survival of the individual mandate are missing the considerable consolation prize they won when the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional... --snip-- When Nancy Pelosi, asked where...

In today’s deeply disappointing decision on Obamacare, a majority of the Supreme Court actually got the Constitution mostly right. The Commerce Clause — the part of the Constitution that grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce among the states — does not authorize the federal government to force Americans to buy health insurance. The Court, by a 5–4 margin, refused to join all the august legal experts who insisted that of course it granted that authorization, that only yahoos and Republican partisans could possibly doubt it. It then pretended that this requirement is constitutional anyway, because it is merely an...

THERE’S PLENTY to be said as a policy matter both for and against the Affordable Care Act, but it’s beyond reasonable debate that it complies fully with the Constitution...[Snip]... The one provision whose constitutionality is questioned is the individual mandate...[Snip] That mandate, too, is constitutional. Congress found that the cost of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured totaled $43 billion in 2008, raising annual premiums for the average family by over $1,000. Suppose Congress had required anyone who received medical care at public expense in 2010 to purchase insurance for 2011 or face a modest increase ($750 per year) in...

The Supreme Court's ruling in Obamacare v. the United States of America is yet another body blow to the U.S. Constitution's principle of limited government and the freedom tradition, but there is a major upside. Despite President Obama's opposition to an individual mandate when he was debating Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries and despite his postelection insistence that Obamacare's mandate does not constitute a tax, his lawyers insisted otherwise, and the Supreme Court bought it. So we have a law with enormous reach -- one-seventh to one-sixth of the economy -- having been fundamentally misrepresented to the American...

Axelrod spinning

Isn't there some sort of legal precedent that taxes have to be applied equally? Does yesterday's ruling invalidate the "waivers"?

....But while Roberts may have saved Obama's signature domestic legislation — and perhaps his reelection campaign — by siding with the court's liberal wing, he actually did it in spite of Obama, not because of him. Roberts' opened his opinion today by declaring, unequivocally, that the individual mandate — which requires people to buy insurance or pay a penalty — is not constitutional under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. It's a direct shot at the Obama administration's defense of the law's constitutionality, which largely relied on those two clauses, which give Congress the power to regulate...

Back in 2010, Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett, who has been described as the legal architect behind challenges to the health care law,.......Yet in the wake of the Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority decision to uphold the mandate on taxing power grounds, Barnett has been downplaying the legal significance of that precedent, especially relative to the Court’s ruling that the law was not allowable under the Commerce Clause.......“Chief Justice Roberts rewrote the (health care) statute to change this from a requirement, or mandate, to an option to buy insurance or pay a penalty,” Barnett explained. “This is far less dangerous...

A memo published by White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe advises allies to mislead when they discuss the recent Supreme Court decision on the individual mandate, saying they should call it a penalty when it is in fact a tax. “In light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Republicans in Washington are trying to deliberately misrepresent the President’s record of cutting taxes for the middle class,” Plouffe wrote in his memo Friday. “We welcome this debate on middle class taxes, and we urge you to seize this opportunity to go on offense to illustrate how...

TheU.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to uphold all but one part of the 2010 healthcare law produced some strong reactions. Supporters declared victory and opponents vowed to keep fighting. That much was to be expected. But Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s rant against the high court’s ruling was a surprise of sorts. The physician-turned-elected-official appeared to suggest that the court needs a legal lesson or two. “Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional,” Paul said in a statement. “While the court may have...