Off-Topic

The hilarious thing is her father is a multi millionaire. If she ever needed money she could go crawling back to daddy

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-passionate-defender-of-what-he-imagines-c,2849/

Back to the decision...I thought this was a very interesting view of Roberts' decision.

Well the good news is the Commerce Clause is not a run away power door for unrestrained Congressional meddling. The bad news is Roberts failed to put in any restraint on Congress' actions to compel action through the use of punitive taxes. As ridiculous as this sounds, based on Roberts' opinion, what prevents Congress from requiring everyone buy a cell phone or own one or be taxed for failure to comply?

Political theater with posturing on both sides. The issue will be the economy and moving ahead with the Affordable Health Plan will crater the economy through the election.

In the final analysis, Obamna and his minions were ecstatic ("it is Constitutional Bitches") about the decision while opponents hung crape and looked for any hanging fruit to claim something of value.

I think this decision cooked Obama's turkey dinner early but ruined the Country.

What prevents Congress from requiring everyone to pay most of every dollar they make to the government? Let's say Congress passes a tax increase tomorrow and DOUBLES taxes. Let's say the marginal taxes are now 70%!! People get pissed. People appeal to the Supreme Court ... Court upholds the law as constitutional. That doesn't mean that the Court thinks the law is good policy or makes sense.

What prevents Congress from doing really dumb things and what limits Congress passing stupid taxes? Well, in theory, the democratic process. Don't like it? Vote the idiots out and pass lower taxes through democratic means.

That makes sense, but the insidious nature of the "it is not a tax" lie Obama spread, was there were a tleast 4 Democratic Senators who would not vote for the bill if it included new taxes, though two were bribed with considerable taxpayer money for their States to get their votes, so maybe that is not true.

But this is how the process is supposed to work, except for the lying and apparent stupidity. It looked like a tax, was enforced by the tax collector, and it was silly to believe it was not a tax.

I said this yesterday, 8 Justices played politics and one justice called it fairly according to the law.

Hat tip to PantsEnFuego

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The great thing about legislatures is that one idiot Republican can't get your example accomplished. To make your example come true would take a large number of idiot Republicans, plus some equally idiotic Democrats, acting in concert. In which case we'd be in exactly the same position we were one week ago, or one year ago, or ten years ago. As it stood then and as it stands now, Congress can pass anything they're allowed to pass, no matter how idiotic, as long as it doesn't run afoul of the Supreme Court. Realistically, it seems to me that little has changed except to reaffirm the status quo.

Repeal Glass-Steagall just 'cuz everything has been going so well lately? Force Fanny and Freddy to allow hopelessly dangerous financial transactions to happen by the millions? Launch a second simultaneous land war in Asia based on cooked-up evidence? Pass the greatest ever expansion to Medicare and make zero effort to fund it, shoving well over $1 trillion directly onto the national debt? Give the Postal Service a mere 10 years to pre-pay 75 years of future health benefits into a fund, thereby unnecessarily saddling it with crushing debt for decades? Congress can do all of these things, and has. They didn't need the health care ruling for that, and the health care ruling wouldn't stop any of that now. In fact, the health care ruling didn't even stop the Affordable Care Act's most controversial provision, and that was the whole reason for the conservative challenge to the law in the first place. What has changed?

The ruling basically seems to affirm the way Congress already works. They can't go further than roughly where people already assumed they had to stop. But they can still do exactly the thing a lot of people wanted to stop Congress from being able to do in the first place. Now the remaining debate is demoted about a half-dozen ranks, to whether the individual mandate is still to be called a mandate or a tax. Up until yesterday, both sides had political reasons to INSIST that it was a mandate, not a mere tax. To call it a tax today because Roberts did yesterday, you have to claim that your guy, the fastidiously conservative Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the man noted as perhaps his generation's foremost authority on the practical application of Constitutional law and limits thereto, has a flawed understanding of constitutional law but nails tax law dead nuts. Call it a tax for any other reason, and Roberts was correct in his ruling. There's not much conservative victory in all that, in politics or in principle.

I shared people's concerns over what else could be mandated if health care coverage was mandated, but hey -- health care was still "mandated." Maybe someone who knows a ton more about this than me can comment on why Congress can't impose a tax on everyone, and then offer a deduction to those who can prove they exercised their free will to eat at least x pounds of broccoli during the last last tax year. Is this now impossible to pass in principle?

Might that email have been sent regardless of the ruling?

I mean, I don't see how coverage would have gotten cheaper if the law were thrown out and the status quo maintained. And it certainly seemed that many major coverage providers were going to stick with some key changes required by the law regardless of the USSC ruling.

I'm basically just curious about all the wild claims at this point, given that the law's passage is over and done with. This thread has me convinced of nothing thus far except that there are no obvious bugaboos truly waiting to ruin America.

I think I'm starting to come around to what Roberts was trying to do (my guess). He had to be as true as he could to the integrity of the SCOTUS, while positioning the law as abominably as possible, in order to force the American people to choose their own destiny, instead of relying on what is always a whimsical SCOTUS. A tax is guaranteed to piss off voters. Of course, he DOES want to see Obamacare gone, but didn't want SCOTUS to be the direct mechanism for it, for many reasons, mostly political.

So, he came up with an interpretation of the mandate that probably would be rejected by most appeals courts, but who rejects SCOTUS? The ball is now in the court of the American voters.