Thursday, June 28, 2012

Supreme Court Upholds the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare or Whatever)

Posted By on Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 8:18 AM

deal_with_it.jpg

So, there was a ruling and the entire right wing shed a collective sad tear. Jon Justice is taking advice from Tyler Vogt, failed city council candidate, on the air. Small business owners who subscribe to Glenn Beck's pseudo-cable network are claiming they're going to give up on their life's work. Dogs are kissing cats. The whole world has lost its mind.

The money quote from the opinion [giant PDF behind the link]:


Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.

From the dissent:


The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent.

Reactions and whatnot to come.

UPDATE: The decision, "in plain English," from the Atlantic:

The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn't comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

A note: please stop saying SCOTUS. It makes you sound like that asshole Jonah from Veep:

Tags: , , , , , ,