Supreme Court Justice Eric Holder
The NSSF wants you involved in elections. Major civil rights cases decided by one vote!
Reminds me to mention that I still think Roberts is a genius with his Obamacare ruling. You see, the case can still be challenged. Roberts said it’s a tax. Well, you can’t challenge a tax until you pay it, per law. So, once someone starts paying it, he may get a libertarianish twofer. The first being the court actually acknowledges the commerce clause exists. And someone challenging a tax. Sure, I’m way out on a limb but you never know.
July 18th, 2012 at 9:48 am
He said that Congress didn’t intend it to be covered by the Anti-Injunction Act, so they could rule on it before someone paid the tax. It’s a smaller split-the-baby — the Anti-Injunction Act is kinda an unconstitutional infringement by the legislative branch on the executive branch, but one that justices like in the overwhelming majority of cases — which is why it is tremendously illogical, but it means that the mandate tax itself can’t be successfully challenged again*.
* Barring information not present in the first case, such as if the IRS were to enforce it so heavily that it became a punishment instead of a tax. That’d require possible imprisonment or ~10% of income tax rates, from the case law.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:40 am
“The first being the court actually acknowledges the commerce clause exists.”
I was under the impression that they have always acknowledged that it existed. It’s just that this time they said the government had over-reached its authority.
July 18th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Look Roberts screwed the American people over. No ifs ands or buts about it. More power to the gov’t.
July 18th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
If he made the decision based on politics, he should resign.
Waaaaay outside the scope of the court’s authority (though none of them seem to care or acknowledge that).
Also, all revenue bills have to originate in the House.
This did not.
July 18th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Well, it’s not the ruling I’d have preferred. But he did say that the Supreme Court’s job is not to save the country from bad political choices. That’s entirely correct and if you look at this in long perspective, it’s a libertarian point, telling us to sit up, take responsibility, and choose politics carefully.
The Left has long gotten its way by using the SC to legislate what they couldn’t get through Congress.
As I read it, Roberts’ message was this: elect better people and hold them to account through elections.
I suspect Roberts also slipped the Commerce Clause (a source of much Lefty statism) a poison pill in that he declared there are limits to what the Commerce Clause can be stretched to cover. But these are all abstract, long-game gambits — and I’d much prefer that he slapped it down hard.
Yet perhaps not coincidentally, by upholding Obamacare. he made BHO’s re-election less likely because the law is widely unpopular and the best route to repeal and erase is now with a new administration.
Of course, that was before BHO committed his beaut of a game-changing faux pas “(You didn’t build that…:”) last week. Short take? My hunch (and indeed fervent hope) is that this one comment cost him the election.
In it he reveals how thoroughly un-American he is in word, thought, and deed. This guy — who appears to be a good family man — is nonetheless a total product of today’s academy.
And that’s where he should have stayed and never entered politics, for which he’s manifestly unsuited. So let’s get him back to his natural environment as soon as possible.