Left Takes ObamaCare To Court – Supreme Court
The struggle over the Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) is facilely cast as a battle between Left and Right. Nothing could be farther from the truth. A tussle between the dominant factions of the Democratic and Republican Parties it certainly is in a superficial and temporary way, until the kabuki politics of the presidential campaign is over. But a battle between Left and Right, it most assuredly is not. Obamacare is opposed by the Left, which has long sought Single-Payer (Medicare for All) as a proven way to universal and egalitarian coverage. But many Leftists have been too cowed by Democratic operatives or by Obama loyalists in their midst to speak their convictions. Now that silence has been shattered.
Contingency Plans Are Few if Court Strikes Down Insurance Requirement
By KEVIN SACK
WASHINGTON — After a day punctuated by seeming skepticism from Supreme Court conservatives about the constitutionality of requiring Americans to buy health insurance, the justices will turn their attention on Wednesday to how much of the 2010 health care law might survive if they strike down that mandate.
If the court invalidates the insurance requirement, the White House and a divided Congress would be left to pick up the pieces. Their first steps toward finding alternatives to reduce the number of uninsured in the country — nearly 50 million, or one in six Americans — would depend heavily on how far the Supreme Court goes, and on the balance of power in Washington after the November elections.
Court: What's Left of Health Law Without Mandate?
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — The heart of the Obama administration's health care overhaul hanging in the balance, the Supreme Court is turning to whether the rest of the law can survive if the crucial individual insurance requirement is struck down.
The justices also will spend part of Wednesday, the last of three days of arguments over the health law, considering a challenge by 26 states to the expansion of the Medicaidprogram for low-income Americans, an important feature toward the overall goal of extending health insurance to an additional 30 million people.
The first two days of fast-paced and extended arguments have shown that the conservative justices have serious questions about Congress' authority to require virtually every American to carry insurance or pay a penalty.
The outcome of the case will affect nearly all Americans and the ruling, expected in June, also could play a role in the presidential election campaign. Obama and congressional Democrats pushed for the law's passage two years ago, while Republicans, including all the GOP presidential candidates, are strongly opposed.
But the topic the justices take up Wednesday only comes into play if they first find that the insurance mandate violates the Constitution. If they do, then they will have to decide if the rest of the law stands or falls.
The Supreme Court’s Momentous Test
In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.
The skepticism in the questions from the conservative justices suggests that they have adopted the language and approach of the insurance mandate’s challengers. But the arguments against the mandate, the core of the health care reform law, willfully reject both the reality of the national health care market and established constitutional principles that have been upheld for generations.
The Obama administration persuasively argues that the mandate is central to solving the crisis in America’s health care system, which leaves 50 million people uninsured and accounts for 17.6 percent of the national economy. The challengers contend that the law is an unlimited — and, therefore, unconstitutional — use of federal authority to force individuals to buy insurance, or pay a penalty.
That view wrongly frames the mechanism created by this law. The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.
Could Defeat in Court Help Obama Win?
By ROSS DOUTHATIf the Supreme Court decides to strike down the new health care law’s individual mandate to purchase insurance, it will represent a remarkable election-year rebuke for President Obama – the rejection, by the nation’s highest court, of a central provision of his main domestic policy accomplishment.
It might also help him win re-election.
The unpopularity of the president’s health care bill is a settled reality of American politics. But as liberals have long hastened to point out, not every provision of the bill is unpopular. If you isolate the legislation’s various components, many of them poll reasonably well.
The individual mandate, though, tends to be far less popular than the legislation as a whole. In a recent Reason/Rupe poll, 50 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the health care legislation, while 62 percent believe the mandate is unconstitutional. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of respondents said that the Supreme Court should invalidate the entire law – but another 25 percent said that the court should keep the law but throw out the individual mandate.
The mandate’s defenders note that many Republican politicians used to support an individual mandate, and that what was once a fringe libertarian critique of mandates has only lately become the conservative party line. But while the Republican flip-flop is real enough, this wasn’t a case of conservative politicians kowtowing to radical ideologues. It was a case of conservative politicians recognizing – as had Obama himself, when he attacked Hillary Clinton for supporting a mandate during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign — that what looked like a “fringe” anti-mandate sentiment was actually shared by a large majority of Americans.
Elephants Down Under
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Christchurch, New Zealand
I’ve learned three things visiting New Zealand and Australia: There is a place in the world where rugby is front-page news. There is a place in the world — the Auckland airport — where the restrooms have digital clocks in the entryway telling you hourly when they were last cleaned and when they will be cleaned again. And there is a place in the world where moderate Republicans still exist — unfortunately, you have to take a 13-hour flight from Los Angeles to get there.
Indeed, to go from America — amid the G.O.P. primaries — to Down Under is to experience both jet lag and a political shock. In New Zealand and Australia, you could almost fit their entire political spectrum — from conservatives to liberals — inside the U.S. Democratic Party.
Or as Paul Quinn, a parliamentarian from New Zealand’s conservative National Party, once told a group of visiting American Fulbright scholars: “I will explain to you how our system works compared to yours: You have Democrats and Republicans. My Labor opponents would be Democrats. I am a member of the National Party, and we would be ... Democrats” as well.
For instance, there is much debate here over climate policy — Australia has a carbon tax, New Zealand has cap and trade — but there is no serious debate about climate science. Whereas in today’s G.O.P. it is political suicide to take climate change seriously, in Australia and New Zealand it is political suicide for conservatives not to.
On last day of health care hearing, Supreme Court considers severability, Medicaid expansion
By N.C. Aizenman and Robert Barnes,
The Supreme Court will complete its review of President Obama’s health care law Wednesday by considering whether all of the law must fall if part of it is found unconstitutional, and whether the law’s proposed Medicaid expansion violates the federal-state partnership.
The Medicaid expansion decision might have the most lasting impact on the federal government’s ability to use its spending power to pressure state action. The Supreme Court has said there is a limit to what the government can force states to do in order to receive federal funds — a condition cannot be “so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion.” But the court has yet to find a case where the federal government has gone too far.
The 26 states challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act say this is the case. They are protesting the law’s intent to open Medicaid to a far larger share of the poor. At least technically a voluntary program for states, Medicaid is jointly funded with state and federal dollars.
States argue it will cost them millions of dollars because of the number of poor that will access the program in order to meet the law’s requirement that almost all Americans must have health insurance by 2014.
Obamacare is not a civil rights issue
By Kathleen Parker,
By now you’ve heard it plenty: The Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” is like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This creative bit of dot-connectingbegan with President Obama and has been perpetuated by countless talk-show hosts and their guests.
By implication, to oppose Obamacare is tantamount to opposing civil rights, which, roughly translated in this country, means being racist. This may not be what Obama intended, but if not, it was accidental brilliance.
On “Hardball” this week, as Chris Matthews was cross-examining a guest about the constitutionality of the insurance mandate — the main issue before the Supreme Court — he asked whether she thought the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. After all, that piece of legislation (correctly) forced businesses to sell goods and services to people they otherwise might have chosen to deny access
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