The Goat Pen

aTm wrote:

Maybe the United States dodged a bullet this week. Make that a deep-penetration bunker buster into the original idea of America. On Tuesday, the justices of the Supreme Court sounded, on balance, to be disposed against affirming the Obama health-care law's mandate.

It is not a certainty that Tuesday's discussion of the ObamaCare mandate means it will be overturned. It's still worth thinking about the implications if the court affirms the law's individual mandate. Should that happen in June, two things would follow: The Commerce Clause's authority would be unfettered. Big as that is, the implication of an unfettered Commerce Clause is larger: That will be the day the United States becomes France.

The Affordable Care Act is not merely a "law" that the Supreme Court argued over this week. It is a massive Rube Goldberg contraption. Its 2,700 pages include every pipe, whistle and valve that the nation's academic health-care economists and doctors have soldered together from infinite studies of hospital data. The new machine even has its own boiler-room crew, the 15 health-care academics of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, who will monitor and adjust the flow of medicine through the national health-care pipelines.

They say their magnificent machine will work for everyone in America only if everyone in America is inside of it. This was Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of the law's mandate. This is what the Catholic hospitals discovered when the ACA's designers pulled the sheet off the new machine.

ObamaCare itself is a masterpiece of mandarin abstraction. Yet 67% of polled Americans believe this masterwork's mandate is unconstitutional. What are these people thinking?

In the closing pages of "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," Bernard Bailyn summarized the core concern about the Affordable Care Act's reach that is trying to find its voice today: "At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that would dominate the nation."

We shall see.

Professor Tiger wrote:CNN's Jeff Toobin thinks the individual mandate is toast.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t1#/vi ... -three.cnn

The MSNBC politburo was saying similar things last night. They were blaming the solicitor general for the debacle, not the tyrannical nature of the law itself, of course.

I think if SCOTUS strikes the individual mandate down, Obama the statist will be sad, but Obama the politician will be relieved. Obamacare is by far the most unpopular thing he has done as president. If SCOTUS throws it out, they are taking that big vulnerability off the table so it can't be used against him in the fall.

The other big winner if Obamacare is struck down would be Romney. We will all be spared the spectacle of watching him oppose Obamacare as the R nominee, which would be like watching Bill Clinton campaigning against adultery.

puterbac wrote:

Professor Tiger wrote:CNN's Jeff Toobin thinks the individual mandate is toast.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t1#/vi ... -three.cnn

The MSNBC politburo was saying similar things last night. They were blaming the solicitor general for the debacle, not the tyrannical nature of the law itself, of course.

I think if SCOTUS strikes the individual mandate down, Obama the statist will be sad, but Obama the politician will be relieved. Obamacare is by far the most unpopular thing he has done as president. If SCOTUS throws it out, they are taking that big vulnerability off the table so it can't be used against him in the fall.

The other big winner if Obamacare is struck down would be Romney. We will all be spared the spectacle of watching him oppose Obamacare as the R nominee, which would be like watching Bill Clinton campaigning against adultery.

Ummm why couldn't it be used against him in the fall? It is his signature thing. Are people supposed to believe he would just drop it in a second term and not try and do something else even more egregious?

Jungle Rat wrote:Who's the dude with the hoodie? He makes me nervous. He's acting weird. Looks like he's on drugs or drunk or something. He just broke my nose and smashed my head in the ground a few times. He smelled like weed. I shot him. I had to.

Hacksaw wrote:USS Enterprise on her last deployment. Her decommisioning will truly be the end of an era. In an age where nuclear power is still a controversial subject, "Big E" sails into history after a half-century traversing the globe on nuclear power. I only hope there will be another Enterprise.

I care not to see a ship named Gerald R Ford

I'd much rather see another Saratoga.

Chris Thile (of The Punch Bros. & Nickle Creek)
@christhile
Humor me. Close your eyes and imagine banjo music. What you hear is Earl Scruggs. He invented that. Thank you, Earl.” Amen.

Hacksaw wrote:Letting the government take over isn't the answer. And that's what is going on here. Obama has said that is his eventual goal. What he's done to this point has just been an incremental step towards his ultimate goal.

So, yes, I will celebrate his failure.