The Supreme Court's upholding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a victory for President Obama, but one with a big problem attached to it. After all, there is a deadly tripwire concealed inside the court's seemingly benign ruling, and that is the court's declaration that the individual mandate provision, the heart of Obamacare, is legally valid because it is a de facto "tax."
By labeling the mandate a tax, the Supreme Court has given the Republicans powerful ammunition for the Presidential campaign. From now till November, it is a safe bet that Mitt Romney will take every opportunity to demonize the healthcare law as a vehicle for more taxation, and in the tough economic climate of today, his argument might hold some power. Scaring voters with the specter of new taxes may not be novel, but it is tried and tested.
So now we have to ask, what exactly did the Supreme Court do here? On the surface, they acted in a non-partisan manner to deliver real justice, but reading between the lines, it seems more as if Justice John Roberts deliberately sandbagged President Obama. Had the Supreme Court ruled against the healthcare law, or even just the mandate, the public's respect for the court would have declined dramatically, and Justice Roberts knew that. As an alternative, it appears as if he hatched a strikingly clever plan: uphold the law but interpret it in such a way as to give the Republicans a real chance to rally support against Obamacare and hopefully repeal it in the future. Not only that, but the ruling also limits Congress' authority to regulate commerce and weakens its power over the states.
One of Justice Roberts' statements in the opinion, which he wrote himself, drives his personal prejudice home very clearly: "It Is Not Our Job to Protect the People From the Consequences of Their Political Choices." It does not take a political analyst to decipher the ominous implication in that statement -- Justice Roberts thinks that the American people made the wrong choice by electing Obama and then letting him pass the healthcare law, but that it's just not the Supreme Court's role to do anything about it. Talk about passive aggressive.
The current Supreme Court may not be malicious but neither is it entirely impartial in its rulings, or apolitical. From Citizens United to immigration (by upholding the "show your papers" provision of the Arizona law) and now healthcare, the conservative wing of the court has repeatedly shown its preference for ideology over law.
Since the healthcare ruling, the news has been full of commentary about how Justice Roberts preserved the integrity of the court by upholding the president's signature law, but the truth is he did nothing of the sort. What he actually did was play a masterful stroke of chess that protects him and the other conservative Justices from public ridicule (save from a few right-wing extremists) while still playing ball with the Republicans. Justice Roberts may be conservative in his judicial thinking but he is also smart enough to know that striking down a populist law that will provide relief for millions of middle class and poor Americans is really bad politics.
Given all this, we should stop idolizing Justice Roberts' seemingly noble gesture and recognize it for what it really is -- a political gambit to help Romney win the elections in November and to push the United States towards the conservative agenda incognito. Only time will tell what this all leads to, but there is a very real chance that the vote that Justice Roberts cast in favor of the healthcare law was his most conservative one yet.
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"By labeling the mandate a tax, the Supreme Court has given the Republicans powerful ammunition for the Presidential campaign. From now till November, it is a safe bet that Mitt Romney will take every opportunity to demonize the healthcare law as a vehicle for more taxation..." and walk into a minefield about balancing the budget in MA without raising taxes. That's a double edged sword (one that will almost certainly be taken up by a couple of SuperPACs, and might hurt Romney more than it helps him).
Then Roberts found a way to "...uphold the law but interpret it in such a way as to give the Republicans a real chance to rally support against Obamacare and hopefully repeal it in the future. Not only that, but the ruling also limits Congress' authority to regulate commerce and weakens its power over the states." Roberts had no need to uphold the law to limit the power to regulate commerce. He could have done that quite easily while killing the law (just read the far-right opinion). Instead, he called a spade a spade (or, if you prefer, a strike a strike) by calling the mandate a tax (which it is) and went from there. The only reason it was called a penalty in the first place was to avoid political fallout.
Not to mention keeping that toxic "mandate" neatly anchored around O's neck. Smooth move, Justice Roberts.
Could it be that his personal experience in dealing with the health insurance company made him more sympathetic to the ACA than people wanted to admit?
Secondly, the Obama administration made two arguments about the mandate. The first was that it was constitutional under the commerce clause. The second was that the penalty was a tax, and therefore constitutional under Congress' power to tax. Roberts ( and it should be pointed out the rest of the liberal justices) rejected the commerce clause argument.
While I disagree that a sector that is 1/7th the economy doesn't constitute interstate commerce, I also can see the logic of someone with Roberts point of view to not want to expand Congress' authority into regulating inaction. I think health care is a special case, but whatever.
Ultimately, if you look at the full opinion, it seems clear that Roberts didn't want this to be decided by the Courts. This is a political fight, not a constitutional fight. Congress can regulate health care. Whether it should is something that is best left to voters.