Supremes uphold Obamacare
SourceSupreme Court upholds key parts of Obama healthcare law
Jun. 28, 2012 07:59 AM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul.
The decision means the huge overhaul, still only partly in effect, will proceed and pick up momentum over the next several years, affecting the way that countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care. The ruling also hands Obama a campaign-season victory in rejecting arguments that Congress went too far in requiring most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.
Chief Justice John Roberts announced the court's judgment that allows the law to go forward with its aim of covering more than 30 million uninsured Americans.
The justices rejected two of the administration's three arguments in support of the insurance requirement. But the court said the mandate can be construed as a tax. "Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness," Roberts said.
The court found problems with the law's expansion of Medicaid, but even there said the expansion could proceed as long as the federal government does not threaten to withhold states' entire Medicaid allotment if they don't take part in the law's extension.
The court's four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined Roberts in the outcome.
Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. "The act before us here exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying non-consenting states all Medicaid funding," the dissenters said in a joint statement.
Obamacare is a government welfare program for doctors, hospitals and the medical industry.
Hospital stocks jump after health care ruling
SourceHospital stocks jump after health care ruling
by The Associated Press - Jun. 28, 2012 07:23 AM
Stocks of hospital companies are moving sharply higher after initial reports said the Supreme Court upheld the individual insurance requirement in President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
HCA Holdings stock is up 10 percent. Community Health Systems is also up 10 percent.
Stocks of drug companies and medical device makers are slightly lower for the day as analysts sort through the Supreme Court's ruling. Stocks of the biggest insurance companies are also lower.
Health care ruling a political victory for Obama
SourceHealth care ruling a political victory for Obama
by Steve Peoples - Jun. 28, 2012 07:33 AM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's decision to uphold President Barack Obama's sweeping health care law is a crucial election-year victory for the Democratic incumbent.
It also marks a pivotal point in the presidential race.
For Obama, the decision vindicates his most significant legislative accomplishment.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney opposes the health care overhaul and is expected to double-down on his campaign pledge to repeal the law if he is elected.
The high court announced Thursday that it was upholding the individual insurance requirement at the heart of the health care overhaul.
High court upholds key part of Obama health law
SourceHigh court upholds key part of Obama health law
Posted: Thursday, June 28, 2012 7:31 am
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the vast majority of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul, including the hotly debated core requirement that virtually all Americans have health insurance.
The 5-4 decision means the huge overhaul, still taking effect, will proceed and pick up momentum over the next several years, affecting the way that countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care.
The ruling hands Obama a campaign-season victory in rejecting arguments that Congress went too far in approving the plan. However, Republicans quickly indicated they will try to use the decision to rally their supporters against what they call "Obamacare."
Stocks of hospital companies rose sharply, and insurance companies fell immediately after the decision was announced that Americans must carry health insurance or pay a penalty.
Breaking with the court's other conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts announced the judgment that allows the law to go forward with its aim of covering more than 30 million uninsured Americans.
The justices rejected two of the administration's three arguments in support of the insurance requirement. But the court said the mandate can be construed as a tax. "Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness," Roberts said.
The court found problems with the law's expansion of Medicaid, but even there said the expansion could proceed as long as the federal government does not threaten to withhold states' entire Medicaid allotment if they don't take part in the law's extension.
The court's four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, joined Roberts in the outcome.
Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Kennedy summarized the dissent in court. "In our view, the act before us is invalid in its entirety," he said.
The dissenters said in a joint statement that the law "exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying non-consenting states all Medicaid funding."
In all, the justices spelled out their views in six opinions totaling 187 pages. Roberts, Kennedy and Ginsburg spent 57 minutes summarizing their views in the packed courtroom.
The legislation passed Congress in early 2010 after a monumental struggle in which all Republicans voted against it. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Thursday the House will vote the week of July 9 on whether to repeal the law, though such efforts have virtually no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has joined in calls for complete repeal.
After the ruling, Republican campaign strategists said Romney will use it to continue campaigning against "Obamacare" and attacking the president's signature health care program as a tax increase.
"Obama might have his law, but the GOP has a cause," said veteran campaign adviser Terry Holt. "This promises to galvanize Republican support around a repeal of what could well be called the largest tax increase in American history."
Democrats said Romney, who backed an individual health insurance mandate when he was Massachusetts governor, will have a hard time exploiting the ruling.
"Mitt Romney is the intellectual godfather of Obamacare," said Democratic consultant Jim Manley. "The bigger issue is the rising cost of health care, and this bill is designed to deal with it."
More than eight in 10 Americans already have health insurance. But for most of the 50 million who are uninsured, the ruling offers the promise of guaranteed coverage at affordable prices. Lower-income and many middle-class families will be eligible for subsidies to help pay premiums starting in 2014.
There's also an added safety net for all Americans, insured and uninsured. Starting in 2014, insurance companies will not be able to deny coverage for medical treatment, nor can they charge more to people with health problems. Those protections, now standard in most big employer plans, will be available to all, including people who get laid off, or leave a corporate job to launch their own small business.
Seniors also benefit from the law through better Medicare coverage for those with high prescription costs, and no copayments for preventive care. But hospitals, nursing homes, and many other service providers may struggle once the Medicare cuts used to finance the law really start to bite.
Illegal immigrants are not entitled to the new insurance coverage under the law, and will remain one of the biggest groups uninsured.
Obama's law is by no means the last word on health care. Experts expect costs to keep rising, meaning that lawmakers will have to revisit the issue perhaps as early as next year, when federal budget woes will force them to confront painful options for Medicare and Medicaid, the giant federal programs that cover seniors, the disabled, and low-income people.
The health care overhaul focus will now quickly shift from Washington to state capitals. Only 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., have adopted plans to set up the new health insurance markets called for under the law. Called exchanges, the new markets are supposed to be up and running on Jan. 1, 2014. People buying coverage individually, as well as small businesses, will be able to shop for private coverage from a range of competing insurers.
Most Republican-led states, including large ones such as Texas and Florida, have been counting on the law to be overturned and have failed to do the considerable spade work needed to set up exchanges. There's a real question about whether they can meet the deadline, and if they don't, Washington will step in and run their exchanges for them.
In contrast to the states, health insurance companies, major employers, and big hospital systems are among the best prepared. Many of the changes called for in the law were already being demanded by employers trying to get better value for their private health insurance dollars.
"The main driver here is financial," said Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, which has pioneered some of the changes. "The factors driving health care reform are not new, and they are not going to go away."
Justice Ginsburg said the court should have upheld the entire law as written without forcing any changes in the Medicaid provision. She said Congress' constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce supports the individual mandate. She warned that the legal reasoning, even though the law was upheld, could cause trouble in future cases.
"So in the end, the Affordable Health Care Act survives largely unscathed. But the court's commerce clause and spending clause jurisprudence has been set awry. My expectation is that the setbacks will be temporary blips, not permanent obstructions," Ginsburg said in a statement she, too, read from the bench.
Supreme Court upholds Obama’s health-care law
SourceSupreme Court upholds Obama’s health-care law
By Robert Barnes, N.C. Aizenman and William Branigin, Updated: Thursday, June 28, 9:42 AM
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Thursday joined the liberal wing of the Supreme Court to save the heart of President Obama’s landmark health-care law, agreeing that the requirement for nearly all Americans to secure health insurance is permissible under Congress’s taxing authority.
Even as it upheld that central component of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, however, the court modified another key provision of the law, ruling that the federal government cannot withdraw existing Medicaid funding from states that decide not to participate in a broad expansion of Medicaid eligibility.
The court’s historic compromise, which will affect the health-care choices of millions of Americans, amounts to a major victory for the White House less than five months before the November elections, although the Medicaid decision sets new limits on the power of the national government.
President Obama welcomed the ruling, which he called “a victory for people all over this country whose lives will be more secure.” He said the decision would allow the health-care law to offer millions of currently uninsured Americans “an array of quality, affordable health-insurance plans to choose from” starting in 2014.
“Today the Supreme Court also upheld the principle that people who can afford health insurance should take the responsibility to buy health insurance,” Obama said in televised speech at the White House. He said he knew that this individual mandate “wouldn’t be politically popular” and that the debate over the law “has been divisive.” But he said the law was “good for the country” and “good for the American people.”
“The highest court in the land has now spoken,” Obama said. “We will continue to implement this law. And we’ll work together to improve on it where we can. But what we won’t do, what the country can’t afford to do, is refight the political battles of two years ago or go back to the way things were. With today’s announcement, it’s time for us to move forward.”
Illustrating the divided nature of the ruling, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, representing the court’s most consistent conservatives, read a scathing dissent, while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, representing the liberals, issued a separate opinion supporting Roberts but differing with him on key aspects of the case.
Still, Ginsburg’s summation seemed to serve as the bottom line: “In the end, the Affordable Health Care Act survives largely unscathed.”
Joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., Kennedy called the majority’s decision a “vast judicial overreaching” that “creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect.”
The Medicaid ruling, Kennedy said, leaves state governments in a difficult position: “States must choose between expanding Medicaid or paying huge tax sums . . . for the sole benefit of expanding Medicaid in other states.”
The high court rejected the argument, advanced by the Obama administration, that the individual mandate was constitutional under the commerce clause of the Constitution. But Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices – Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan – in ruling that a penalty for refusing to buy health insurance amounts to a tax and thus is permitted. Ginsburg favored going further, and allowing the mandate under the commerce clause.
Passage of the legislation by the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 capped decades of efforts to implement a national program of health care. The act is supposed to eventually extend health-care coverage to more than 30 million Americans who currently lack it.
“No longer will Americans be a heart attack or a car crash away from bankruptcy,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday after the ruling. “No longer will Americans live in fear of losing their health insurance because they lose their job.”
Republicans in Congress and GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney have vowed to try to repeal the measure.
“What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day as president,” Romney said late Thursday morning. “And that is, I will act to repeal Obamacare.”
The health-care issue thrust the Supreme Court into the public spotlight unlike anything since its role in the 2000 presidential election. The court’s examination of the law received massive coverage — especially during three days of oral arguments in March — and its outcome remained Washington’s most closely guarded secret.
The court reviewed four questions: whether it was within Congress’s constitutional powers to impose the individual mandate to purchase health insurance; whether all or any additional parts of the law must be struck down if the mandate is rejected; whether an expansion of Medicaid was unduly coercive on the states and whether all of those questions can even be reviewed before the mandate takes effect.
The individual mandate, known technically as the “minimum coverage” provision, was considered a crucial part of the overall health-care legislation because striking it down would have jeopardized the ability of insurers to comply with other, more popular elements of the law without drastically raising premiums.
Under those other provisions, for example, insurers can no longer limit or deny benefits to children because of a preexisting condition, and young adults to up age 26 are eligible for insurance coverage under their parents’ plans.
During oral arguments in March, conservative justices indicated they were skeptical about the individual mandate, the provision in the 2,700-page health-care law that requires nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a financial penalty.
Arguing the case for the Obama administration, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. defended the law as a constitutional exercise of congressional power under the charter’s commerce clause to regulate interstate commerce. He said lawmakers were regulating health insurance to deal with the problem of millions of people who lack coverage and therefore shift costs to the insured when they cannot pay for their medical care.
Paul D. Clement, representing Florida and 25 other states objecting to the health-care law, argued that Congress exceeded its power in passing the law, which he said compels people to buy a product.
In a 59-page opinion, Roberts wrote: “The Affordable Care Act is constitutional in part and unconstitutional in part.” He said the individual mandate “cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the commerce clause,” which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce but “not to order individuals to engage in it.”
Roberts added: “In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress’s power to tax.”
Neither the plaintiffs in the case nor the Obama administration had argued before the court that the individual mandate was a tax. Instead, the court asked a Washington lawyer to present the argument that lawsuits against the health-care law were premature under an obscure 19th-century law, the Anti-Injunction Act, which bars suits against a tax until the tax is actually paid.
Under the health-care law, penalties for refusing to buy health insurance do not kick in until people pay their 2015 income tax returns.
In its ruling, the court did not accept that the Anti-Injunction Act precludes a decision on the health-care law, but it embraced the argument that the penalty amounts to a tax.
Ginsburg, in a separate, 61-page opinion joined by Sotomayor and in which Breyer and Kagan concurred in part, said she agreed with Roberts that the individual mandate provision “is a proper exercise” of Congress’s taxing authority. But she said she “would hold, alternatively, that the Commerce Clause authorizes Congress to enact” the provision. Ginsburg also wrote in her opinion that the Constitution’s spending clause “permits the Medicaid expansion exactly as Congress enacted it.”
The court majority, however, ruled that the law’s expansion of Medicaid can move forward, but not its provision that threatens states with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if the states declined to comply with the expansion.
Roberts wrote that the portion of the health-care law that expands Medicaid “violates the Constitution by threatening existing Medicaid funding.”
Congress can offer the states grants and impose accompanying conditions, “but the States must have a genuine choice whether to accept the offer,” Roberts said. “The states are given no such choice in this case: They must either accept a basic change in the nature of Medicaid, or risk losing all Medicaid funding.”
However, the remedy for that violation is to preclude such a sanction, not to strike down other parts of the health-care law or scuttle the legislation as a whole, he said.
The finding was unexpected — every lower court that has ruled on the issue has upheld the constitutionality of the Medicaid expansion. And it raises immediate questions as to how effectively the federal government will be able to implement a provision that is central to the law’s goal of substantially reducing the share of uninsured Americans.
Medicaid provides health insurance to the poor and disabled with a combination of federal and state dollars. Beginning in 2014, the health-care law significantly broadens the program’s minimum eligibility requirements. About half of the tens of millions of Americans who will be newly covered through the law will gain coverage this way.
Initially, the federal government will foot the entire bill for covering the newly eligible. But its share will gradually drop to 90 percent by 2020 and beyond, with states required to pick up the rest. The 26 states challenging the expansion argued in court that this requirement would impose a crushing burden on their budgets.
In their searing dissent, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito said the entire health-care law should have been thrown out because its “complex structures and provisions” exceed the authority of Congress.
“The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty. It is not,” the dissenting justices wrote. “It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions.”
Instead of avoiding constitutional difficulties, the decision “creates them,” they wrote. The judgment on Medicaid expansion “ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union.”
The dissenters said the ruling “undermines ... at every turn” the values of caution, minimalism and limited federal powers.
No initiative has exemplified Obama’s progressive domestic agenda or inflamed his conservative opponents like the health-care law. The court’s decision will resonate throughout the election season, not only in the presidential campaign but in House and Senate races across the country.
The law provoked an unlikely debate about the Constitution. Opponents saw it as a trespass on individual and state’s rights by an omnipotent federal government, and supporters viewed it as a long-sought guarantee of health care to Americans regardless of where they live or work.
Although the most controversial provisions of the law are not scheduled to take effect until 2014, a complex web of new rules has already extended coverage and expanded benefits across the country.
As a mark of the case’s importance, the justices spent more than six hours over three days hearing oral arguments on the constitutional questions and related issues. It was the most time than the court has spent on any issue in nearly half a century.
As soon as Obama signed the health-care bill in March 2010, opponents raced to challenge it. Early court decisions followed a predictable pattern, with district judges appointed by Democratic presidents upholding the law and Republican appointees striking it down.
But at the appeals court level, that changed. In a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, Judge Frank Hull, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, joined with a Republican colleague in saying that the individual insurance mandate in the “unprecedented” legislation exceeded congressional authority. The judges said that if the law were constitutional, it would be impossible to say what action on the part of the government would go too far.
At the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, two prominent Republican-appointed judges agreed that the law is intrusive but said it is within Congress’s powers.
In Cincinnati, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee, was the deciding vote to uphold the act. In Washington, Senior Judge Laurence Silberman, named to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, wrote an opinion saying that the question was political, not constitutional.
“It certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty,” Silberman wrote. But then — alluding to other cases in which the Supreme Court has ruled that the commerce clause gives Congress power — he added that “it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race, that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain, or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family.”
Even as the legal wrangling grew to a crescendo, some aspects of the law were already being enforced. Those include requirements that many insurance plans allow young adults to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26; cover a range of preventive services, including birth control, without imposing co-payments or other out-of-pocket costs; eliminate lifetime dollar limits on coverage; and begin phasing out annual caps.
The three cases the Supreme Court considered were National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius; Florida, et al., v. Department of Health and Human Services; and Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, et al.
Obamacare isn't a tax - Honest!!!!
Obamacare is a tax increase
Source
'Obamacare' to cause big tax hike
Jun. 29, 2012 12:00 AM
During the last presidential election, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly said that he would lower taxes.
During the "Obamacare" debate, President Obama and his fellow Democrats argued that the individual mandate is not a tax.
In front of the Supreme Court, team Obama argued that the individual mandate is a tax and not a violation of the Constitution's commerce clause. The Supremes agreed.
Bottom line: Obamacare is a massive fraud perpetrated on the American people. It is one of the largest tax increases in history and likely would not have passed had it been presented as such. Come November, I suspect many people will make their displeasure known at the polls.
-- Tim King, Cave Creek
That’s not the federal government we have today.
Roberts' pettifogging rescues Obamacare
For whatever reason, Chief Justice John Roberts decided to rescue Obamacare from the constitutional trash heap.
His reasoning in doing so should be an embarrassment to him. It certainly tossed more dirt on the burial site of the founders’ vision of a federal government with limited, enumerated powers.
Roberts’ decision controlled the outcome, even though it was fully joined by no other justice. Here’s what he concluded:
* The federal government has no power under the Constitution’s commerce clause to require individuals to purchase health insurance, as Obamacare does.
* However, the federal government does have the power to impose a financial penalty on people for not complying with the mandate the federal government has no authority to impose. That’s because the penalty is actually a tax under Congress’ constitutional taxing authority.
* However, the penalty is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, which would preclude the court from considering its legality until someone actually pays it.
Where to begin?
If Congress has no authority to require people to do something, such as purchase health insurance, how can it penalize them for not doing it? And how can money owed exclusively because of failing to comply with an unconstitutional mandate be regarded as a tax and not a penalty?
The purpose of the constitutional taxing power is to raise the money to operate the government. The clause reads: “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes … to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.”
The purpose of the penalty for not buying health insurance, however, isn’t to raise revenue. The government would prefer not to get any money from it at all. The purpose is to compel compliance with the mandate that Roberts says the government has no power to impose.
There is nothing in the Constitution that can remotely be construed as giving Congress the power to tax people, not to raise revenue, but to punish them for failing to do what Congress would like for them to do. If Congress cannot do something directly, it shouldn’t be able to do it indirectly through taxation.
Congress, unlike Roberts, understood that it was enacting a penalty, not a tax. The law repeatedly calls the money owed for failing to comply with the individual mandate a penalty.
Roberts says that what Congress calls it isn’t dispositive regarding whether it is a tax under the Constitution. But it is dispositive for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act.
The Anti-Injunction Act prevents those who are subject to federal taxes from challenging their legality until after they have been paid. If the penalty is a tax, then no one could challenge its legality until after someone pays it, which won’t happen until 2014. The case wouldn’t properly have even been before the court.
So, Roberts declared that the money owed for failing to comply with the individual mandate is a tax for purposes of the Constitution, because he says so. But it’s a penalty for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, because Congress says so.
In Robertsworld, an unconstitutional mandate becomes not a mandate if the money owed for not complying is dubbed a tax and not a penalty. But the same money can be both a penalty and a tax depending on who is asking and why.
It’s as though Roberts were channeling Lewis Carroll in writing the opinion.
This decision is hardly the end of the Obamacare saga. Obamacare will implode as it is implemented. The country will have to readdress the question of how to most cost-effectively subsidize the care of the seriously and chronically sick.
But for today, let’s mourn the death of reasoning and something more important. In Federalist No. 45, James Madison wrote: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”
That’s not the federal government we have today. Roberts’ pettifogging on Obamacare can be seen as its final interment.
Roberts declines comment on health-care ruling
Chief justice evades health-care questions
by Del Quentin Wilber - Jun. 29, 2012 11:31 PM
Washington Post
FARMINGTON, Pa. - A day after issuing his controversial opinion upholding President Barack Obama's landmark health-care law, Chief Justice John Roberts jokingly deflected questions about his historic ruling. At one point, he even said he was going to spend a few weeks teaching a course in the nation of Malta, which he described as an "impregnable island fortress."
Roberts was alluding to escaping criticism from conservatives upset that he sanctioned a law they abhor.
But if the chief justice felt any anxiety about authoring the decision, he didn't show it during a long-scheduled discussion at the bi-annual judicial conference hosted by the D.C. Circuit.
The soft-spoken Roberts, wearing a dark suit and bold red tie, not only skirted questions about his controversial and historic ruling, but he issued a series of quips about everything from his predecessors to rules he would like to change, such as this one: "The odd historical quirk that the chief justice only gets one vote."
The judicial conference was held at the secluded Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington, Pa., a four-hour drive from Washington.
It was clear he was among friends -- he once served on the circuit's appeals court and is the justice assigned to hear requests for stays and some other matters that emerge from the circuit's courts.
Earlier on Thursday, shortly after the opinion became public, conservative lawyers and judges could be spotted moping about the resort, questioning how one of their most reliable votes on the court could write the 5-4 opinion upholding a statute that had been savaged by Republican politicians.
But within a few hours, those same conservatives treated Roberts with deference when he was whisked into the resort's large room to attend the conference's formal dinner.
Conservative friends shook his hand and patted him on the back.
When Roberts was introduced at the dinner's conclusion, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation.
Liberals in the audience said they applauded fiercely to thank Roberts for saving the health-care law.
Conservative lawyers clapped, they said, because they respected the way he reached his opinion, even if they didn't like the outcome.
"When I first saw that it was a 5-4 decision and the chief justice was the deciding vote, I wondered, 'How did this happen?' " said John O'Quinn, a Justice Department lawyer during the Bush administration. "Then I read the opinion and the reasoning behind it and realized it was filled with thoughtful reasoning. ... People can respect the man whether they agree with the opinion or not. That is enough reason to give an ovation."
Said Chief District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Republican appointee: "There is a feeling that people are happy to see the judiciary does not appear to be partisan. After all of the partisan bickering going on, the court's opinion was based on legal principals. ... There is a general feeling of relief that partisanship doesn't have anything to do with how the court ruled."
Why Roberts did it
By Charles Krauthammer, Published: June 28
It’s the judiciary’s Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against Obamacare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.
Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court’s legitimacy, reputation and stature.
As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration’s central argument that Obamacare’s individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce.
That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the commerce clause, what can it not do?
“The Framers . . . gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,” writes Roberts. Otherwise you “undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.”
That’s Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the court, acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held. Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “deferred stable settlement of the issue” by the normal electoral/legislative process.
More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5 to 4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.
Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with Obamacare. Hence his straining in his Obamacare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5 to 4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.
National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts’s concern was that the court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.
How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.
Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the commerce clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the commerce clause fig leaf.
Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.
That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice and not the chief. But that’s how he did rule.
Obamacare is now essentially upheld. There’s only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That’s undoubtedly what Roberts is telling the nation: Your job, not mine. I won’t make it easy for you.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Oops! 'Romneycare' also has penalties/taxes
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has joined the chorus of partisan critics calling the Affordable Care Act a tax increase, based on the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld the law.
At the same time, Romney touts his time as Massachusetts governor, when a similar law was passed. And he contends that he never raised taxes.
The health care law in Massachusetts, however, like the Affordable Care Act, does charge “penalties” for those who can afford to participate but choose not to.
Are those taxes?
The Wall Street Journal reports (see it here) that the state has collected over $20 million in “penalties” just this year. And millions for every previous year.
So how does this political spin work?
Is it “penalties” when it comes to Romney's plan but “taxes” when it comes to Obama’s?
Column: Supreme Court didn't agree with Obama
By Jonah Goldberg
Last Thursday, President Obama walked before the cameras and said, "Good afternoon. Earlier today, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act— the name of the health care reform we passed two years ago. In doing so, they've reaffirmed a fundamental principle that here in America — in the wealthiest nation on earth — no illness or accident should lead to any family's financial ruin."
A bit later, Obama added, "Today, the Supreme Court also upheld the principle that people who can afford health insurance should take the responsibility to buy health insurance."
The casual listener might take Obama to be saying that the Supreme Court agrees with him and that the ruling was a ringing endorsement of what Obama takes to be the core "principles" of ObamaCare.
But that's not the case, at all.
The dissenting opinion written by four justices found the whole thing to be an affront to the Constitution. And the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the law is constitutional for reasons the president — a famous teacher of the Constitution — passionately rejected.
"You reject that it's a tax increase?" George Stephanopoulos asked the president in a now legendary interview in 2009. "I absolutely reject that notion," replied Obama.
In Roberts' words
Obama might respond that regardless of how they got there, the justices did affirm the principles of ObamaCare. Nope. "We do not consider whether the act embodies sound policies," Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. "That judgment is entrusted to the nation's elected leaders." And again, Roberts writes of ObamaCare: "It is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness."
This was Justice Roberts' diplomatic way of paraphrasing Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous defense of judicial restraint: "If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job."
No doubt, Obama is delighted with the court's decision. The court might have repudiated the president's own opinions, but as a political matter there's little doubt Obama welcomes such repudiation.
Still, it's telling that Obama's fraudulent claim that the Supreme Court agrees with him is not so unusual. The president has a well-known habit of insisting that not only is he right, but also that all smart people agree with him.
For instance, in a 2009 discussion of the economic stimulus, Obama toldTheWashington Post's Fred Hiatt, "Whatever arguments may be made by the critics at this point, there was no economist out there who thought we didn't need to do (it)." Or, in a speech about energy last March: "What I just said about energy, by the way, is not disputed by any energy expert. Everybody agrees with this."
Let the record show that there are, in fact, economists and energy experts who disagree with Barack Obama. Really.
Beyond what this tendency says about the president's own character, it certainly reveals the arrogance of liberalism itself. There is something about the nature of liberalism that causes its adherents to argue as if it is the one true faith. But rather than speak the language of faith, they instead speak the vocabulary of expertise. They claim "sound science" and the support of "all experts" as if their opponents are devoid of facts and reason.
Contempt for democracy
There's a troubling contempt for democracy in this approach to politics because it assumes that your opponents have nothing of substance to contribute to the discussion. Moreover, this assumption inexorably leads liberals to think that if we could just let the experts run things, then everything would be great.
This was the faith of the original progressives who pushed, in the words of legendary news commentator Walter Lippmann, the "mastery" of scientific governance over the "drift" of messy markets and disorganized democracy. The New Deal and the Great Society were grounded in the same vision of infinitely capable technocrats.
Even John F. Kennedy argued that the problems facing the country "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.
Just last year, Peter Orszag, former Obama Office of Management and Budget director, was making the same argument. "We need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions," Orszag argued, "by making them a bit less democratic." The answer to our problems, Orszag proclaimed: "Automatic policies and depoliticized commissions."
It's no wonder that this mindset led to the creation of ObamaCare. Indeed, this is the real principle at the core of the act: the idea that if we can just give the experts, the commissions, the panels and boards enough power to do "what all experts" believe, then everything will be great, particularly if we can force citizens and businesses alike to heel.
In fairness, the court didn't affirm that principle either, but it did say that if the voters want to go to that corner of hell, we can.
Jonah Goldberg, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.
More state leaders considering opting out of Medicaid expansion
By N.C. Aizenman and Sandhya Somashekhar, Published: July 3
A growing number of Republican state leaders are revolting against the major Medicaid expansion called for under President Obama’s health-care overhaul, threatening to undermine one of the law’s most fundamental goals: insuring millions of poor Americans.
The Supreme Court opened the door Thursday when it announced that although the rest of the law is constitutional, the federal government cannot punish states that refuse to adopt the measure’s more generous eligibility rules for Medicaid.
The Republican governors of four states — Florida, Iowa, Louisiana and South Carolina — have declared that they want to opt out of the expansion. Leaders of half a dozen other states — including Texas, home to one of the largest concentrations of uninsured people — are considering following suit.
The governors argue that expanding their Medicaid programs, which are jointly funded with state and federal money, would crush state budgets. And they are turning the issue into a roiling election-year battle over the federal government’s role.
“The president . . . needs to understand what makes this country great in part is that we’re not dependent on government programs,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends” program. “It seems to me like the president measures success by how many people are on food-stamp rolls and government-run health care. That’s not the American Dream.”
Such a message has the potential to further fuel the tea party movement, which galvanized three years ago over the health-care legislation and could put enormous pressure on GOP leaders. Already, large tea party organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are urging their members to lobby states to reject the federal Medicaid money, with a particular focus on the 27 that challenged the law in court.
The ramifications could be far-reaching, because the law’s top ambition is to extend coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans. More than half of those people are slated to receive insurance through the Medicaid expansion.
“This has always been the core of the law, and the court has just made it optional,” said Matt Salo, director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.
The prospect has alarmed and energized not just advocates for the poor but also representatives of hospitals, which are chronically burdened with the cost of treating the uninsured. Hospital associations agreed to help fund the law by accepting various cuts to their reimbursement rates with the expectation that they would be more than compensated by money from patients newly insured through Medicaid.
Now they worry that they will be stuck with only the downside of that bargain, said Bruce Rueben, president of the Florida Hospital Association.
“If you’re dealing with a high number of uninsured people and your payments from other sources go down, you have no way to cover that unmet cost,” he said.
Salo predicted that hospital representatives will soon be directing a lobbying blitz at governors and state legislatures — which, in most cases, will decide whether to expand Medicaid.
“They are going to be camping out at the doorstep. And they will do that in all 50 states,” he said.
White House officials contend that this is only one of several reasons the vast majority of states will eventually go along with the Medicaid expansion — which, beginning in 2014, will open the program to people with incomes at 133 percent of the federal poverty level, a far more generous standard than what most states currently offer.
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Jacob J. Lew noted that the government will pay the full cost of covering the newly insured in the first two years, and never less than 90 percent after that.
“It is the most generous federal match in the history of Medicaid,” he said. “And I think a governor’s going to have to answer to their own people. . . . For those few that are slow to come in, they’re going to have to answer to people why they’re turning this down and why they’re letting people go without coverage.”
Republicans counter that the state share of the tab could still prove crippling. And the argument offers a chance to hammer home a major GOP talking point: that the government cannot keep growing without fraying at the seams, said Rich Galen, a Republican strategist who served as press secretary for then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.).
“The issue is: If you keep expanding unemployment insurance and expanding Medicaid and expanding food stamps, then sooner or later the money runs out and you become Greece or Spain or Italy,” Galen said. “They’re not saying, ‘I want people dying in the streets.’ They’re saying they want to fix the economic infrastructure.”
Several analysts suggested that governors could be playing for leverage to gain more flexibility to shape their Medicaid programs in the event that Obama is reelected.
“It’s a fantastic negotiating strategy,” said Robert Laszewski, a health-care consultant and former insurance executive.
He predicted that governors could push Obama for permission to privatize parts of their Medicaid programs or to open eligibility only to those with incomes up to 100 percent of the poverty level instead of 133 percent. They also could request that the federal contribution to Medicaid be sent to them as a block grant without strings attached.
“I think they’re going to work themselves a much better deal than they would have had and then declare a Republican victory, because they’re essentially going to get some form of Republican Medicaid reform,” Laszewski said.
Still, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is one of several who said they are waiting for the November presidential election in hopes that a victory by Mitt Romney could empower the GOP to repeal the overhaul.
And if the law survives the election, would Walker favor expanding his state’s Medicaid program? “It’s premature to comment on that,” said his spokesman, Cullen Werwie.
Roberts' pettifogging rescues Obamacare
In Federalist No. 45, James Madison wrote: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”
Roberts declines comment on health-care ruling
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Charles Krauthammer - Why Roberts did it
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Oops! 'Romneycare' also has penalties/taxes
You mean Mitt Romney is a lying politician just like Obama???
Supreme Court didn't agree with Obama
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More state leaders considering opting out of Medicaid expansion
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