The Supreme Court actually got it right for once-but the fact it was a 5-4 decision is troublesome for many reasons. This should have been a no brainer for the Court. Of course to do that-you need high caliber Justices.
The Supreme Court led by Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr. upheld the heart of President Obama's healthcare law Thursday, ruling that the government may impose tax penalties on those who do not have health insurance.
The decision came on a 5-4 vote, with the court's four liberal justices joining with the chief justice.
On one hand, Roberts agreed with the law's conservative critics who said Congress does not have the power to mandate the purchase of a private product such as health insurance.
But the Affordable Care Act does not impose a true legal mandate on Americans, he said. It simply requires those who do not have health insurance by 2014 to pay a tax penalty.
And that is constitutional, Roberts said. "The federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance," he wrote in the majority opinion. "The federal government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance," he added.
The mandate is expected to raise about $4 billion a year to help pay for healthcare coverage.
The opinion by the chief justice is likely to surprise his liberal critics and his conservative admirers. He played the decisive role in rejecting the Republican-led legal challenge to theDemocrats’ most ambitious social legislation in decades.
Thanks be to God! Now the ruling is going to have to be parsed for some days to come.
Women in particular should pop the champagne and celebrate. Of those millions of uninsured, 19 million are women.
Justice Ginsburg (joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) agreed with the Chief Justice’s bottom line – that the mandate is constitutional under Congress’s ability to tax – even while disagreeing with his Commerce Clause conclusion; those four Justices would have held that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce to pass the mandate. With five votes to uphold the mandate, it will survive, and the Court did not need to consider the “severability” issue — that is, what other parts of the law would have to go if the mandate were unconstitutional.
And so-by a very narrow majority the Court did the right thing.
I tried to watch the US news about this when I got home. Because I have Sky Satellite all I get is Fox News. I lasted all of 40 seconds watching Lindsay Graham prove what a worthless piece of shit he is by whining about the decison. It took me that long to flip a bird at the TV and tell him to go fuck himself. Then I switched to Bloomberg for much more rational news.
Unexpected though it may be- A great day for America.