We're still parcelling out just what the Supreme Court decided this morning—nobody knows yet what to make of the Medicare portion rejection, for instance—but some smart minds can process this stuff faster than others. If you only have about 20 minutes to read up on the law, here are the articles to read.
"Don't Call It A Mandate — It's A Tax," by Lyle Denniston, SCOTUSBlog
"What the Court’s ruling does do, though, is important far beyond health care. Five Justices of the Supreme Court — the Chief Justice, for his reasons, and Thursday’s four dissenters, for their reasons — agreed that Congress cannot command individual Americans to buy a commercial product against their will...At the same time, Congress has been told — by more than an implication — that if it can muster the votes to pass new laws to improve the social welfare of America, it might be better advised to create new cultural obligations that can be enforced under the tax code. Would that power be far narrower than what Congress has long enjoyed under the Commerce Clause? That is a highly debatable point. The tax code has proven to be a remarkably flexible set of laws for coaxing or compelling changes in human behavior (witness, of course, the high tax on cigarettes)."
"The Progressive President Speaks: About Damn Time," by Charles Pierce, Esquire
"The popular opinion among the pundits is that the president should now walk softly on this issue, or that the issue will fade as the campaign rolls on. I think that would be as big a mistake as his pulling back in the face of the manufactured outrage of 2010 was. The president should talk about this every day. He should pin the Massachusetts program to Romney's forehead. He should force the issue out of economics and into an argument about the general welfare."
"Obama Wins The Battle, Roberts Wins The War," by Tom Scocca, Slate
"The business about "new and potentially vast" authority is a fig leaf. This is a substantial rollback of Congress' regulatory powers, and the chief justice knows it. It is what Roberts has been pursuing ever since he signed up with the Federalist Society. In 2005, Sen. Barack Obama spoke in opposition to Roberts' nomination, saying he did not trust his political philosophy on tough questions such as 'whether the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce.' Today, Roberts did what Obama predicted he would do."
"The Political Upshot of the Roberts Vote," by Noam Scheiber, New Republic
"Had Anthony Kennedy been the deciding vote, the conventional wisdom would have been that this was a partisan decision with an unreliable and unpredictable swing-voter more or less arbitrarily siding with the liberals. But with the Court’s conservative chief justice providing the fifth vote, the decision has real heft. Not only is this likely to grab the attention of voters who had no opinion beforehand (though opinion-formation is simply beyond the capacity of some of them), it’s likely to get the attention of the fraction of health care opponents who told pollsters they wouldn’t necessarily be upset if the court affirmed the decision. And that could be a very big deal for the political legitimacy of the health care law going forward."
Next: Repeal is A Fantasy
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