Long ball
Keep telling you, Roberts is smart.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
July 23rd, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Bwahahahahahahaha!!! That’s a good one. Stop it, you’re killing me. Oh, wait, you actually believe it. Seriously?!
Look, Roberts sold you (us) out because he was afraid of bad press and being called a “racist” (if he’d struck down Obama’s signature achievement). That’s it.
Roberts did what he did out of fear and cowardice, not from any type of Spock three-dimensional chess gambit. He had a choice to make: strike down O-Care and risk alienation by the centers of power and prestige inside the Beltway, or go-along-to-get-along and piss off millions of meaningless, powerless serfs (which is how those centers of power see us). He made his choice.
Seriously, folks, don’t demean yourselves by trying to rationalize a defeat into some kind of long-term victory. It’s like the beaten woman who keeps rationalizing her husband’s attacks (“Oh, he’s just working so hard”, “Things will be better when he’s got a job again”, “It’s my fault — he’s so smart and I’m so dumb, so he gets frustrated with me sometimes for being so slow.”). It’s pathetic.
July 23rd, 2012 at 12:24 pm
If Roberts had been smart, then he would have said “The question of whether the penalty would be legal as a tax is not before the Court, since the government has stated repeatedly in its arguments that it is not a tax. Because we find the mandate is unconstitutional, and the act does not include a severability clause, we must find that the entire act is void. Congress was quite capable of adding such a clause, and quite knowledgeable of the necessity of doing so, had they wanted the act to survive any of its provisions being found in violation of the Constitution.”
By insisting that it’s not a tax, the government handed him the act all tied up nicely, and instead of beheading it he cut the ropes.
July 23rd, 2012 at 12:29 pm
No, Mike, I think Roberts is playing a much deeper game than anyone can imagine (at least without sitting a long time and thinking hard on it).
By tossing it back to the People, he returns to the voters the means to take things into their own hands at the ballot box and the court of popular opinion. The more that comes out- and I mean actual, hard facts- about the ACA along with the rest of this Porkulus, boondoggle administration, the more chance the People have to give the Administration and legislators up for re-election this November the boot.
As I’ll readily admit, whether or not the Common Man is smart enough to realize this and make advantage of it is something else entirely but the opportunity is the voters to use or lose.
Roberts doesn’t give a flip about what Congress/the media/the talking heads and the punditry think of him. All he cares about is “is it Constitutional?” which is exactly as it should be. Supreme Court justices should be, and rightfully so, above the political fray and need to have thick skins because that’s the way it was intended to work when Old Dead White Guys set this all up. He’s just doing his job, and I’m glad of it.
July 23rd, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Rabbit…this was judicial activism…no way around it. He re-wrote the law to make it stick.
July 23rd, 2012 at 1:06 pm
We can argue judicial activism until the cows come home, but I have a feeling this could set up a situation where the nightmare of Unintended Consequences from a liberal/”progressive” stance could lead to a privatization of Social Security and Medicare. I wasn’t happy at all with the decision when it came out. I’m still not overly thrilled about it, but I know people who know the man, and there’s something deeper in this that is going to give the Democrats night terrors for years.
July 23rd, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Rabbit, HL is right. Roberts did everything in his power, up to and including re-writing the statute itself, to ensure that it would pass muster.
The job of the USSC isn’t to be a rubber stamp for the Legislative branch, but to call a spade “a spade” if that is what it is. Roberts did NOT want to overturn O-Care, not one bit of it. He twisted and turned, re-wrote the Government’s case for it (saving the neck of that buffoon of a Solicitor General), and found enough of a justification to go-along-to-get-along.
Think on this: by upholding O-Care in its entirety, Roberts has essentially ruled that the IPAB (the “Death Panel”) provision is Constitutional. Have you read this thing? It basically says that an un-elected panel of bureaucrats will be able to make irrevocable decisions regarding the distribution of medical care in this country, and those decisions will not be subject to Executive, Legislative, or Judicial review or appeal. There is no government agency (not even the Federal Reserve) that has such immunity.
Do you understand what that means? On its face, does not sound at all Constitutional to you? Yet, Roberts said it’s Constitutional, and so this Panel will possess unlimited power, beholden to no one, answerable to no one, elected by no one, making life-and-death decisions for 300 million souls.
July 23rd, 2012 at 2:02 pm
I have to agree that the justices are not there to play games. They are there to rule on the validity of laws based on the US Constitution.
The Solicitor General did mention it was a tax briefly in his defense and Roberts chose to think that was the important arguement.
My question for him would be that the Constitution placed limits on what could and could not be taxed. It had to be amended to allow income taxes. What changed to allow a tax on a non-activity?
July 23rd, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Unc, I’m a firm believer that Roberts is playing Chess while his opponents are playing Checkers (“I’m Barack Obama. I won. King me.”).
I’m less impressed with the argument presented here, but if we do think that Roberts is playing Chess, then he’s several moves ahead of the writer here.
Quite frankly, I’m convinced. Roberts has moved *way* up my list of “smartest people in America”. This sort of reinforces that.
July 24th, 2012 at 12:50 am
Anybody thinking Roberts was somehow playing a log game with that finding will probably also believe that they will be getting cake after they go through the shower…