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(R) Trisha Calvarese
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DEMOCRATS
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June 28, 2012 05:17 PM UTC
93 Comments
Not allowed under the commerce clause.
Apparently, the “tax” or “penalty” is not enforceable; i.e., there is no punishment for not paying this. So, why would a healthy young person who currently does not have health insurance change their stance based on the health care law?
Also, states are not obligated to expand Medicaid coverage. If they have to pay even a dime more by expanding Medicaid coverage, why would they do that, especially in a GOP state?
This seems to be an Obama victory because the law was ruled largely constitutional, but what kind of system will be left with?
Damned if I know.
The SCOTUS’s decision to continue to allow Congress to tax is interesting, yet the unintened consquences will need to be dealt with accordingly. More important, President Barack Obama’s far-reaching law massively violates his 2008 election pledge to not raise taxes those Americans making under $250,000 has been violated … and don’t claim you didn’t already know this fact.
In a post passage Obamacare interview he stated that the law ….
Most importantly, consumers have seen nothing but massive tax, service and insurance cost increases following Obamacare. Personally I saw a 40% jump last fall for my insurance.
Has Obamacare been another factor in the delayed economic recovery? Absolutely.
In addition to Obamacare … Obama has missed the mark by failing to properly reform massive defined benefit government pension schemes, MediCaid/Care “as we know it” and proper debt leveraging to name just a few.
Meanwhile Obama’s reforms have included such gems as the cancellation of contracts for aerial fire response protection, the retardation of private sector labor rights, and an new auto sales scheme that led to the destruction of viable transportation assets and massive cost increases for those Americans requiring affordable personal transportation.
where does it say that in the Constitution?
“the retardation of private sector labor rights”
What rights are those? To work for less without a safe workplace? To have your job offshored?
Or, the rights of the employer to return to a pre-union, every child laborer for him or herself, Dickensonian workplace?
Why, that would be like allowing the Fed to try to fulfill its mandate, to stabilize prices and keep employment high. Treason, I tell you!
Join the insurance pool, you avoid the tax altogether. Or choose the tax.
It’s all about liberty, Lib. You know, that stuff you define as the right to be a freeloader with no personal responsibility. You listen to yourself way too much but you don’t hear what you’re saying.
FLOFLOFFLOFsocialismFLOFFLOFbig government!FLOFFLOFObamacareFLOFFLOFoh wait, I need help from the government, and RIGHT NOW !
Constantly undermine progress at every turn then instantly abandon all of those small government principles the second you need something.
Expansion is constitutional, but Federal government withholding funds for non-complying states is not. That allows states to opt out. Let the games begin.
http://www.scotusblog.com/cove…
GOP: We’re saving taxpayers money by opposing the Medicaid expansion.
Democrats: We’re supporting the Medicaid expansion for hard-working employees who still do not make enough to pay for their health insurance, and helping employers by keeping their employees healthy.
GOP: We’re saving taxpayers money by opposing the Medicaid expansion. Thus encouraging legal workers not to freeload, making businesses compete for workers labor, and keeping a greater portion of money in the productive private sector.
Democrats: We’re supporting the Medicaid expansion for hard-working employees who still do not make enough to pay for their health insurance, and helping employers by keeping their employees healthy. Thus encouraging people to avoid decisions on healthcare and subsiding uncompetitive businesses while deferring ever growing government expenses to those who are accountable and taxing them to boot.
You live in a world of make-believe. “Making businesses compete for workers [sic] labor”? “Productive private sector”? Democrats are the ones “subsidizing uncompetitive businesses”? Sheer fantasy.
And………GM and Chrysler “managed” “bankruptcies” generating preferred outcomes for certain parties and regenerating failing auto producers.
Just as if the GOP doesn’t do the same for defense contractors and other pet industries of theirs.
Pharma or however they spell that….corruption at the core of Obamacare
Credit to you for trying to spin a great loss to you (a great victory to Real People), while all of your compatriots are missing in action. But wrong is still wrong, bullshit is still bullshit, and spin is still spin.
Go over to redstate and ply your misinformation trade. Nobody is likely to call bullshit on you there.
Anyone who tries gets banned.
Why so uptight…..facts don’t fit your view of the world?
Your mileage might vary.
But I’ll take it. I get to keep my insurance that I was only able to get after the thing passed.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/op…
Anyone foresee Roberts taking sides with the progressives on this ruling? I sure didn’t.
As I understand it, Roberts has concerns that “his” court will go down in history as merely political, always 5-4 along those lines.
I gotta say, it took a lot of guts (and major logical shuffling) for Roberts to support the law.
The next breaking news bulletin will be “Justice Scalia’s head explodes!”
The Court doesn’t have a police force or an army to uphold its decisions. It can function only if citizens believe it is legitimate.
I think Roberts was not siding with the progressives per se; I think he was trying to make a statement about the legitimacy of this Court. Had he allowed the Court to decide within purely political boundaries, the legitimacy of his Court would have been questioned.
If true, he picked the most loaded issue to prove it. Couldn’t he have done that with a few votes on less contentious issues? (Parsing, consider this a reply to your comment as well.)
No, I think that if it was Roberts’ intention to make the court seem less partisan a less prominent case would not suffice. No one would remember those lower profile decisions so he needed to side with the liberals on a big issue. He also could genuinely see it as constitutional, but against how he would vote were he a congressman.
Just because something is a bad idea does not mean that there is a constitutional provision or common law precedent that will forbid it. This also goes for liberals on the court. Eight-Zero (one recused) upholding one provision in the Arizona immigration law as only the most recent example.
But I believe Chief Justice Roberts’ calculations are that while he’ll be branded a traitor for this vote, he’s planted a few seeds that may bear fruit later:
1. Taxes are constitutional, so Congress get busy with your next tax cut bill (i.e. repeal Obamacare).
2. If by branding the bill with the dreaded scarlet “T” helps the GOP gain the Presidency and/or control of Congress, then his decision will be looked upon more kindly by his GOP brethren. Remember, he’ll be on the bench another 25 years, so this will be just a minor pothole over the span of his entire career.
2. His message to Scalia: dial back the overt partisan comments. Keep them within the SCOTUS chambers — there will be plenty more opportunities to screw Democrats.
3. Now that he’s established his apolitical bona fides, he’s free to swing back to his normal GOP agenda with less critical scrutiny
there is no “long game.” Roberts is the devil now, and thus forever. Someday some whackjob may try to rehabilitate Roberts for the righties in the same way Michelle Malkin tried to rehabilitate Japanese internment camps, but for now I think most of the true believer conservatives are plotting his impeachment.
position very seriously and doesn’t want to be remembered as a partisan hack/clown, as Scalia surely will be. Hats off.
This must come as a huge shock to all the smug Republicans who thought the worst case scenario would be allowing parts of the act to to stand instead of overturning the whole thing with overturn of the mandate being a given. Bet they’re also pretty surprised at keeping the Kennedy vote but losing Roberts.
Now that the mandate has been upheld, it’s time to right the essential injustice of mandate without any sort of public option. If we are required by the government to purchase insurance, the government should be required to provide an affordable basic public plan instead of leaving us to the tender mercies of private insurers whose only concern is profit.
I remember when Rush threatened to move to Costa Rica if “socialized medicine” passed here. Good choice because they have an excellent universal, high quality, public/private partnership system that, unlike ours, enjoys an exceptionally high degree of across the board public satisfaction and sterling public health outcomes wile maintaining choice for those desiring more than the universal basic plan via the private sphere.
On to joining the rest of the civilized 21st century world!
At realclear the poll averages have lately and for the first time in a very long time been showing Dems just overtaking Rs in the generic congressional preference. Sure, the generic doesn’t reflect how people feel about their own incumbents but it’s better than lagging behind and shows rising appeal of Dem messaging in general. Swing state numbers are improving for Obama where his ad campaign is going all out against Romney. And now this. Even dwyer (that’s dwYer) should be at least a tiny bit, cautiously (of course) cheered.
Sorry, I don’t have a link, but in recent days I saw a major poll that showed what earlier ones have. When asked if they support “Obama Care,”, a majority said “No.”
When asked about specific provisions, almost all were embraced.
The lessons here are that the right wing propaganda machine is effective, and that the left’s is not. Big surprise, I’m sure. But is also means that Obama and lefties have both an opportunity and a necessity to re-educate the ill-informed.
I hope the campaign embraces the term “Obama Care.”
The White House and the propaganda apparatus of the Democratic Party didn’t really push back on, well, anything.
The Repubs are good at lying to people though. Wow.
The right has long embraced Goebbel’s bible.
The average American is so stupid – partly as a result of intentional actions by the right over the last forty years – they don’t know when they are being outright lied to, let alone be able to hold something nuanced.
The left, and I say this having observed it at many levels down to the personal, keep believing that if the voters know the facts, we win. WRONG! Voting is emotional, not rational.
The right has used the mythology of once upon a time we had this great country. Government was small, no one got divorced, we all went to church. Ah, the power of myth! Which, as Joseph Campbell taught us, is how we really learn.
The irony is that the left, the Dems, have the history of The Golden (or mostly so) Years on their side. It took a large government, progressive taxes, and the belief that we are all in this together. You give up some things, you get back a lot more.
Now can we all be nice to dwyer as he/she’s been saying this for years?
But if you are clear about what she has been saying for years, you’re ahead of me. She sometimes leaves me scratching my head. But she has basically a good heart and good logic, just sometimes a bit of trouble expressing herself.
“Obamacare”, they supported the “Affordable Healthcare Act” Repugs still good at labeling.
I hate the term, but it’s been part of the official reelection literature for months now.
which is kinda funny, really. Pretty much takes away the bogieman.
or did he sit down and STFU on this one? Surprised we haven’t heard from our spittle-spewing righties yet. Guess the response memo hasn’t hit their in-boxes.
The potential benefits or detriments to taxing you if you fail to eat the right brand of broccoli and the designated time or fail to abort babies without an active license to reproduce.
It will be interesting when the fascist federal government revokes legal tender for certain economic translations and replaces it with a government couponing scheme.
The spelling errors are a hoot, and the rhetoric makes me imagine a little red faced man, nostrils flaring, sweat dripping into his eyes and greasy mustache, dizzy from the effort (if not the low gas leak that seems to be responsible for his usual incoherent state).
– see it’s a HUGE tax increase
– death panels
– your dr is going to quit medicaine
– Ayn Rand got medicare and social security
– oops, we were wrong
= see, we need the WH so we can get the SCOTUS
– God hates the gays
– OMG – free abortion on demand for illegals
You get the idea
And burn more coal. In fact, we should burn more coal to make more steel to make more guns. That will show those leftist swine who want universal health care, like Gov. Romney.
Wait, this just in…
“Who do you want me to be today?”
The anti-Obamacare presidential candidate, or the governor that signed into law pretty much the same policies?
I hope the Obama team is relentless on the hypocrisy. (Notice that “hypocrite” is an alternative spelling of “Republican.”)
http://www.supremecourt.gov/op…
There are many comments where I called people naive for thinking the Supremes would do anything but the most nakedly political thing here. They may be amusing to reread now.
I may not have written about it here but I had talked about this offline with friends and would have bet my IRA that the mandate was going to be overturned. I’m so happy to be wrong. I can’t wipe the smile off my face.
Sometimes it feels awesome to be wrong. If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I want to be wrong more often. 🙂
but I’m in the same boat with you two. If Chief Justice Roberts was truly concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and chose this ruling to re-establish it (as Ralphie mentioned above) then that is pretty damn impressive.
overturned. The first glimmer of hope I had was when I read the Arizona decision. It briefly occurred to me that there just might be hope for sanity from this Court.
Happiness abounds today. I’m watching Fox News right now, just for fun, just to laugh. Just to gloat. That makes me a petty person and I know it. And I really don’t care right this minute.
I’d say you had a “schadenboner” (h/t HBO’s “Veep.”)
That’s gonna be a keeper. 🙂
I said back in March that the stronger legal argument was to label the mandate as a tax.
http://www.coloradopols.com/sh…
pretty damn astute
I was so zoned in on the commerce clause, I totally overlooked the issue of congress’ ability to tax. Frankly, I didn’t see it as a tax issue.
Now answer these questions:
If it is a tax, how can it be challenged in court before it is imposed? It has not been imposed, so the case should have been thrown out because the plaintiffs had no standing.
The four dissenters do not believe it is a tax. The four concurring justices do not believe it is a tax, they held it was within the government’s authority under the commerce clause. So does the opinion of just one justice, Roberts, that it is a tax, have any precedential effect?
I haven’t read the full decision yet, but I believe Roberts makes the argument that the Anti Injunction Act (AIA), which says you must pay a tax before you can challenge it in court, doesn’t apply because the AIA is statutory and therefore must be narrowly interpreted. And since the statutory language in the mandate calls it a “penalty” and not a “tax”, it doesn’t fall under the AIA. Roberts doesn’t apply the same narrow definition of tax when discussing the Constitutional powers of Congress.
In terms of what precedent it sets, I have no idea. That’s for future courts to decide. There’s a case to make that since only one justice agrees it’s a tax this part of the decision may set only a weak precedent.
However, in the end the concurring justices voted with Roberts to create a majority and being the Chief Justice, Roberts gets to write the official court opinion. I’d argue that any official opinion of the court carries some precedential weight.
Since we’re now calling the penalty a tax, let’s make it more progressive. If you choose not to buy health insurance, you should pay a higher tax if you’re wealthy than if you’re poor.
because as it was ruled….you’re taxing people for failing to conduct a translation.
It’s a totally new concept in the world of taxes. I can’t think of a situation where taxes are levied off of a non-transaction.
In the case of Obamacare they’ve now levied $1.7 billion in taxes on people for not conducting a transaction within the authorities parameters.
Obama’s certainly earned the fascist label with this policy display!
See- if I pay mortgage interest on my home, I can deduct that value frfor tax purposes.
LIkewise, student loan interest.
But if instead I rent and don’t have student loans- I don’t get those deductions.
Now- HIllary-care and other D proposals made health insurance tax deductible, up to a certain income limit. But the R’s hated that idea- because the tax cut didn’t cut taxes on the high income and wealthy. So we get the R alternative – personal responsibility mandate. *
Look- let’s just alter Medicare eligibility to include any American with no other coverage, at market rates for those under 62 1/2, regular Medicare for those over.
* what Governor Romney called it before he was against it.
I’ve hooted about this in the past…I say we divide Tricare into two parts – TriCare Prime is for EVERYONE in the military, retirees and for Guard and Reserve (which makes it a very powerful recruiting tool.)
TriCare Standard and Extended get rolled into the “public option” as AmeriCare Standard and Extended. They move over to being under DHHS, but keep the agreements, contracts (and most importantly) the appeals process as they occur under TriCare.
For those of us who have used TriCare, it would suck a bit. Finding providers is a genuine pain in the ass, but that’s not that much different than when I have to do it for Aetna. But if you want a Cadillac plan, then pay for it. It’s supposed to be a low-cost option, not a flagship competitor.
And one nice thing – TriCare has some of the highest consumer ratings of any health insurance…(link to .pdf)
http://www.tricare.mil/tma/downloads/TRICARE2011_02_28_11v8.pdf
Tricare, Medicare, Medicaid, despite problems, all perform better in polls than the completely private plans.
Damned socialized medicine!
telling us how wrong this decision is and how he will repeal it if he becomes President.
Fuck you, dude. I can’t wait to take out your milquetoast, wishy washy, two faced ass in November.
to ask me to tell you what I really think, darlin’. Don’t push your luck today.
You got some kind of picture for that?
It looks a lot like this.
And probably a bad doctor.
That, however does not negate the validity of any of his opinions on the healthcare system a priori. If he says something stupid, criticize it on its merits. My surgical skills or clinical acumen have nothing to do with my political beliefs.
Boo f’ng hoo.
PUBLIC OPTION polled north of 54% (ie, how much TABOR passed with) back in 2009.
I know, I know, 2010 R “sweep” and …and….Solyndra!
But now that the R’s have staked out their anti-ACA, antu-Obama, anti, , auntie, anti position it’s time for the PResident to make the clear choice even more stark: PUBLIC OPTION in the second term.
So the choice would be crystal clear:
repeal it all (well, at least the death panels and free abortion on demand for illegals and …and Solyndra!) or get the PUBLIC OPTION
I propose a better name than P.O.- perhaps: Health Choice, Without Death Panels.
Or – to make the R house more agreeable, the
American Only Patriotic Tax Cutting Freedom and LIberty Anti-Obama Repeal WIthout Birth Control or Single Mom, Traditional Marriage and Reagan Lives Forever Act.
(Of course there is the finesse IRan/Syria vs attack and occupy, tax cuts for the rich and tax increases for the rest and other clear lines of demarcation)
Fast and Furious – gate.
1) It’s the God given right of everyone to own and buy and sell guns.
B) The Gubmint should not be abel to track that gun ownership nor the buy and sell transactions.
But then people died, and since Obama is not American anyway, we gots to blame him. Solyndra! Death panels! Socialist!
But you’re right – I know the NRA and Breitbart are going to figure a way to spin this into a
blue dress“gate”.You remember this quote:
“I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Good f’n luck with that. If it gets through the Senate too, it’s got a date with the veto pen.
but cheers to Aristotle for figuring it out. Sounds like elephant Latin to me. Good job putting that (s) in there; it totally clarifies things.
The best description of “judicial activism” is a results based process of jurisprudence: start from the result you want and then work backwards from that. It appears that the Chief Justice did just that, perhaps with some eye toward the historical judgement of his tenure’s legitimacy.
The commerce clause has been found to regulate non-participation in markets (see Wickard v. Filburn and Gonzales v. Raich) because it alters the market dynamics for those who do participate. Clearly this is the case with healthcare, as cost-shifting by hospitals allows the uninsured to be treated by having the insured absorb some of the unpaid costs.
It seems that denying the commerce clause argument, which led to the questions “whether or not there are any limits on the Commerce Clause,” “Can you identify for us some limits on the Commerce Clause?”, “Once you’re into interstate commerce and can regulate it, pretty much all bets are off,” “What is left? If the government can do this, what else can it not do?” satisfies the 10thers who want there to be limits to federal power. The tax solution he found is of his own creation, and not found in any of the arguments in the case.
I’ll take it if I can get it. If Roberts couldn’t bring himself to rule on an expansive Commerce Clause, at least he was able to rule in favor of the PPACA.
The hits just keep on coming. I bet he hates the fuck out of the Massachusetts archives:
There may yet be hope for the court.
Not just that Kennedy and Roberts joined the three more liberal (minus Kagan, recused) justices. But because the three liberals joined the other five in the 8-0 vote upholding the “papers please” provision.
It’s ludicrous to claim that police with probable cause, can’t ask for identification. The left’s claim that it will inevitably be abused can’t be taken as a given. The court, 8-0, said this is valid on its face and if you abuse it, we’ll be baaaccckkk…
Given that rare bipartisan spirit, Roberts coming in on health care is less surprising.
Cost, Quality and Access, the Affordable Care Act improves in all three areas. I especially like the part where insurance companies have to spend 85% on, you know, care. Not on executive salaries or administration, or advertising….care!
Lots of work to be done yet, but Obama has started a great conversation with this legislation, and it was long overdue.
Still, better than it used to be.