Supremely Political: Did Roberts Pen BOTH Opinions?

 By Matt Roooney, cross posted from SaveJersey

The ObamaCare backstory gets worse all the time, Save Jerseyans.

We can never really know what happened in chambers. That said, emerging anonymous accounts seem to comport with what we can plainly observe about this repugnant capitulation to unconstitutional, unrestrained big government by Chief Justice John Roberts.

It was supremely political.

Be assured, I’m not leveling this charge simply because I don’t like the decision! The Chief Justice simply didn’t do a very good job of masking his purely tactical motivations.

If you read the conservative Kennedy-Alito-Thomas-Scalia dissent (click here – pdf), one of the first things you’ll notice is how the dissent frequently refers to the majority opinion as the “dissent.” Is the current batch of High Court clerks just sloppy? Or is something else going on here?

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Time to stop whining about Roberts’ decision and think about what’s next

By Harold Kane

On this our Independence Day I think that it is time for the Republican geldings to stop their whining over the Roberts Supreme Court decision and to think about what can be done with the decision. He reigned in the Medicaid expansion. That ruling stopped the Federal government from extorting the states. This portion of the ruling could have implications that we have not yet discovered.

The Obama Administration has granted ObamaCare waivers to 1,200 organizations. These were “thank you” to their supporters. They were granted under the false notion that ObamaCare was constitutional under article 8, the “commerce clause”. Apparently the regulation of commerce was construed to mean giving out goodies to your friends. However since ObamaCare was found to be constitutional under article 7, the taxing power, are the exemptions still valid? Under the tax laws enforced by the IRS we are all treated equally. If I get a deduction for dependent children, so do all citizens who meet the dependent child test. The IRS cannot arbitrarily decide who will get the child exemption based upon political favoritism. The question now becomes are all of the 1,200 exemptions null and void. If they are null and void I’m sure that Obama’s supporters that received them are going to be very unhappy and some of this unhappiness could exhibit itself on Election Day

Just as a note, Fox News played the tape of the Solicitor General making the case for article 7. Apparently this was plan B if the commerce clause was going to fall apart, which it did.

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Chief Justice Roberts’ Foley

A National Review Online Editorial

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, in a 5–4 decision, 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 application of the taxing authority. Rarely has the maxim that the power to tax is the power to destroy been so apt, a portion of liberty being the direct object in this case.

What the Court has done is not so much to declare the mandate constitutional as to declare that it is not a mandate at all, any more than the mortgage-interest deduction in the tax code is a mandate to buy a house. Congress would almost surely have been within its constitutional powers to tax the uninsured more than the insured. Very few people doubt that it could, for example, create a tax credit for the purchase of insurance, which would have precisely that effect. But Obamacare, as written, does more than that. The law repeatedly speaks in terms of a “requirement” to buy insurance, it says that individuals “shall” buy it, and it levies a “penalty” on those who refuse. As the conservative dissent points out, these are the hallmarks of a “regulatory penalty, not a tax.”

The law as written also cuts off all federal Medicaid funds for states that decline to expand the program in the ways the lawmakers sought. A majority of the Court, including two of the liberals, found this cut-off unconstitutionally coercive on the states. The Court’s solution was not to invalidate the law or the Medicaid expansion, but to rule that only the extra federal funds devoted to the expansion could be cut off. As the dissenters rightly point out, this solution rewrites the law — and arbitrarily, since Congress could have avoided the constitutional problem in many other ways.

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