Two Years On: Obamacare

Roberts might prefer narrow rulings, and large consensuses.

I'm not sure he's willing to vote against his beliefs in order to achieve either. And, if he is, he's apparently the only Justice who would do so.

No one has suggested Ginsburg or Breyer would vote in such a fashion, but Roberts would? I don't buy it.

It's all the projection of a liberal mind. It also supposes that a Conservative would be unable to vote with them because he agrees with them, or their legal arguments. But, maybe they could be swayed by emotional issues. Pure liberal thought.

 

They're all Republicans now. They're all yours.

 

Who says he would have to? Roberts is a smart cookie. I'm quite sure he could figure out a way to make the legislation stand - which is the conservative approach, by the way - while deciding it narrowly enough to keep the commerce clause and taxing power under control. In fact, that's another reason I expect the taxing power to be the route the Court goes. They will ignore the commerce clause issue because that's an enormous precedent that they don't want to tangle with if they don't have to.

 

The players in a 58-year-old decision are now Republicans? I'd guess most are now dead. Were they Baptized into the Republican Party posthumously?

What party can we assign Benedict Arnold too?

 

I think this was it.

 

This is why I really hope the decision is at least 6-3 either way.

It won't stop all the "activist judges!" cries, but it will stop many of them because the ruling will then clearly be across partisan lines.

 

I just hope we can get a couple of Conservatives to vote with the Liberals! That will solve all of our problems.

As if Liberals wouldn't fully embrace a 5-4 decision in their favor, That would be fine, but 5-4 the other way would be "purely political".

Absurd.

 

Again: The default is that the Court does not overturn major Congressional legislation. It has not done so since the Great Depression, in fact. So the attention, naturally, gravitates toward the bloc that may overturn it, because that would seem like the so-called "activist" response. If this were a Bush or Romney bill, it would be the other bloc accused of playing politics.

 

Exactly.

Which is why a very conservative friend of mine who happens to be an attorney predicted a 6-3 decision to uphold with Kennedy writing and Roberts also writing a very short concurrence that said, in his best Lou Brown voice, "Nice fucking law, guys, don't ever fucking do it again."

I don't think Roberts would see something like that as a "waste" of his vote and I don't think it's a liberal plot to say so.

 

I said earlier on this thread that I know a guy who clerked for Thomas.

He says 7-2.

 

That's some world champion pull-quoting out-of-context there.

The "racists" the Old Tony referred to among the Democratic voting bloc of that time were almost entirely southern Democrats, a legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction when Republicans were persona non grata in the South for 100 years.

Nearly all of that voting bloc has flipped to the GOP.

But I'm sure you knew that.

 

If they call it a tax, I think that's correct. Scalia comes along, but probably writes a separate concurrence explaining how he could get out of the box he put himself in with the Raich opinion if he wanted to, because, well, he's Scalia, right?