The individual mandate survives as a tax. Will update.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
sounds to me like you’re pretty good at reading the tea leaves 🙂 wanna make a career out of that?
I already have. It’s just not very lucrative.
How was he on the ball?
He was blathering about Anthony Kennedy. And his oh so important feelings and ego. Turns out that other people on the court have their own agency and agendas and stuff. Who knew?
Haven’t seen the ruling posted but I am surprised to see Roberts get to the left of Kennedy. No doubt. Show me one person who predicted that.
However, I did say that it was good news that Roberts authored the opinion and cautiously predicted victory.
Precisely. Nobody knew what they were fucking talking about. There was zero informed prognosticating going on. Everyone might as well have flipped a coin.
Roberts just “balls-and-strikesed” the hell out of us. He’s a smart guy. Slick and savvy. Smarter than us no-count yokels, that’s for sure.
I disagree completely.
I absolutely knew what I was talking about. I couldn’t predict an outcome everyone saw as highly unlikely, and yet I still basically read the tea leaves correctly.
Dude, come on, really?
You arrived at the right conclusion for the entirely wrong reasons. Every single one of your assumptions in that paragraph was wrong.
This was on the ball:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/did-john-roberts-throw-a-wrench-in-major-argument-against
-obamacare.php
No reason to take it personally. I wasn’t right about anything either. I didn’t see Roberts being the deciding vote, against Kennedy.
My position was just that things would ultimately work out fine no matter what happened (they did, obviously, but not for reasons I would have predicted). I just thought that even if we lost, we couldn’t lose. But that’s because I’m a “cavalier degenerate” rather than an enlightened cynic who something, something Dred Scott.
Sorry BJ. Booman called this and called it early.
Besides, wtf are you complaining about? This is a win! Stop sucking on those sour lemons.
Glenn Beck, right now: “:the reason we’re behind the progressives is we’ve been BUSY doing things. Inevnting medicine. Helping people.”
Seriously. that’s what he’s saying. I think I just peed my pants, laughing.
did he say they’ve been busy creating jobs?
No complaining, no sour lemons.
We’re in a bar right now ribbing each other over drinks at the afterparty. Except there’s actually no bar, or booze, and it’s the middle of the morning.
But I’ll take it.
Sorry, it seemed you were serious.
This is an awesome day.
yes, I assumed that Roberts would join in a 6-3 but not a 5-4.
So, did almost everyone else.
However, despite being wrong about that, I was correct to see Roberts opinion writing as a slight indicator that the bill would be upheld.
The key is that I understood that Roberts ruling with us was not just possible but better than a 50% bet.
I dropped the ball on Kennedy, who I thought would rule with us.
69% knew from this survey knew:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/101842/supreme-court-health-care-prediction-aba-survey-lopez
“In an American Bar Association survey of legal experts, 69% determined that the most likely conservative to uphold the ACA is not Anthony Kennedy, but Chief Justice John Roberts.”
Good on our actual legal experts then. They can take a well-earned victory lap. Their profession soldiers on.
People fail to take into account just how conservative Kennedy’s record has been. Those of us on the left who refer to the conservative voting bloc in SCOTUS as the RATS (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia) would be better served to remember them as the STARKers. Kennedy is no centrist.
I would hope this would be a lesson to the fucking doomers, but I won’t hold my breath.
These Chief Justices like Roberts or Rehnquist or whoever may not be “decent” or “moral” guys like we may like, but they’re smart. They’ve got big grandiose designs. And they don’t act like Clarence Thomas or Scalia.
They act like…Obama. They cloak their grand visions in small pragmatic tweaks. No sense blowing up the Commerce clause for a bunch of racists when there’s so much juicy havoc to wreck in so many other arenas for many years to come.
I don’t see how you take a victory lap on this decision when a few hours ago your position was that it wouldn’t matter either way. “Meh,” as I recall.
No victory lap.
The law was Too Big to Fail. It’s the largest wealth transfer in the history of the country. And it already passed once. You can’t just expect that it would get erased and people would just forget about it.
Roberts votes the other way this morning, and you know what, we would be fine. As a whole. I was never reducing it down to individual suffering (and I’m sorry people took offense to that, I don’t begrudge your choice), strictly macro focus. It would work out. The policy is all on our side. The hill had been climbed. The virus was in the water. This was not the end of the line.
Better to believe that things will tend to work themselves out and be labelled naive, then to go around in life assuming that the Great Forces of Evil are inevitably gonna win all the time. We’re Americans. Life is never actually that depressing compared to the alternatives.
So who do you think won today? I ask that in all seriousness, no snark nor other nasty intentions. I understand, or think I do, that Roberts is a corporatist at heart and if he votes to uphold a massive insurance company win then in that view it’s not hard to understand.
But would we be fine if the law had been struck down? Are we “fine” now, for that matter? I will cede this to you, these waters are deep: when Roberts turns himself into the swing vote on a 5-4 decision without Kennedy on board, nothing is as it seems on the surface.
I’m not sure that I follow your idea that the virus is in the water, as such, but for sure there are some forces at work here that we’re not likely to discover overtly for months or years to come. I don’t think I share your conviction that the policy is conclusively on our side, given the polls showing public opinion on the matter.
Last I heard, those alternatives included at least 37 countries with better overall quality of life stats than the “greatest country in the world.” Don’t take that as an excuse to give me the Peggy Noonan treatment, just bear in mind that we tend to sit on our laurels and shout down critics when we should instead be working to improve ourselves.
The insurance companies sure don’t consider this bill a win. They spent a fortune to try to defeat it.
I’ve always been impressed by the ability of people on the internet to ignore everything AHIP has said and done about the ACA, and attribute a position to them which bears no relationship to any objective evidence.
FWIW, I’m happy about today’s SCOTUS decision. I was asking the other Joe a set of specific questions about his take on the situation. Apparently I inadvertently invited abuse from third parties who think “people on the internet” tend to be douches.
To the extent that I appear to have invited third parties to share their opinions that I’m some kind of an internet douche, I apologize. As a future remedy, you might ought to go fuck yourself first, and then make your stupid observations later.
Nice hissy fit.
You’re still wrong about this being a win for the insurance industry, and any attempt to understand the decision that derives from that fallacious assumption is going to be invalid.
At which point precisely did I declare this “a victory for the insurance industry?”
I see it. I meant in that statement that the insurance cos would have 30-50 million new enrollees, so in that respect it would be a victory for them, but at the same time I’m cognizant that there are numerous requirements of the ACA that would curtail current predatory practices by insurance companies.
I think people who needed (and deserved) better health insurance won today. Just because something’s trite doesn’t make it any less true.
If you think the ACA is awesome, then things are awesome. If you think it’s a step in the right direction, then we’ve taken a step in the right direction. We are where we were yesterday. It’s a great law. It deserved to live.
Did you not notice how freaking hard the administration and congress worked to pass the bill? If they lost a court case today, do you really think they’d just give up? Their supporters? Those who follow in their footsteps? “Oh well, I guess we’ll just never pass health care reform again. Shucks.”
No freaking way. Too much was at stake to be all depressed and apocalyptic. If you believe that what you’re doing is the right thing, then believe that good things will come of it. No matter the initial setbacks.
I’m with you on this one, I count today as a victory. I don’t think the ACA is awesome, as such, but as you say it’s several steps in the right direction, and as with Social Security and Medicare in the early days, it opens the door to countless future improvements.
I did notice that, but you have to admit that when the ACA was initially passed the Congress was in a much less crappy state of functionality, although at the time it appeared to be unprecedentedly crappy. Had the ACA mandate been stricken, I couldn’t have seen Congress stepping up to replace the trifling language to rebrand it as a tax, because Congress has since then become entirely dysfunctional.
But I agree with your larger point, this was an idea whose time had come. But it could have been delayed another 10-20 years, had things worked out otherwise.
I think, Joe, you nailed the head of the sumbitch. Roberts is on record as being determined to not be the next Chief Justice Taney. All judges are, to some degree, professional historians. They don’t mind being on the wrong side of a glorious battle … but they don’t want to be seen to be on the side of thugs. Said description which applies to almost all current anti-HCR leadership.
Near as I can figure, this looks like a good thing – arguably the best possible outcome.
Holy crap, watching CNN flashed me to “Dewey Defeats Truman!!”
the swing. I always figured if upheld it would be 6-3.
Apparently Kennedy didn’t like it.
But perhaps Roberts, who is fairly young, is worried about spending the rest of his life on a bench where he has a reputation for joining extreme right decisions. He’s gonna be there a long, long time. As someone pointed out, he’s got conservative justices doing Benny Hill routines during proceedings and generally acting like partisan asses. He’s got to hedge his bets.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
YAHOOYAHOOYAHOOYAHOOYAHOOYAHOO
YEEHAWYEEHAWYEEHAWYEEHAWYEEHAWYEEHAW
Also: Suck on that, Romney and the rest of you rats!
HA!
Kennedy wanted to throw the whole bill out.
Thank God for Roberts.
SERIOUSLY!!! I never EVER thought I’d say that.
I am a bit confused about the Medicaid/states opt-out provision. But I am stunned- pleasantly stunned. OK- I’m not pleasantly stunned. I’m freaking ECSTATIC !
link
Congress can’t withhold Medicaid funding to states that don’t up the ACA Medicaid requirements. I have to read the decision, but it was limited, not invalidated.
President Obama will go down in history for this.
I woke up a lot last night about this decision. I am covered by Medicare and it wasn’t for me that I was worried.
The righties on radio were really going to town about the ACA this morning. Obamacare, indeed.
They were also going on about the Holder contempt of Congress vote today.
The social contract between the people and the government has been permanently changed.
This is a big as the original Medicare, Medicaid law being passed.
What a wonderful day.
medicaid expansion limited, but not tossed out.
From my FB page: I have never had more pleasure listening to Glenn Beck in my life. He is calling GWB a progressive, he has excommunicated Roberts from the conservative movement, and he is giving up on the Republican party FOREVER. Meanwhile, Limbaugh says this is good for Romney, while at the same time saying the rebellion against Obamacare will make the Tea Party look like a walk in the park. I am grinning from ear to ear.
This so awesome in so many ways. Holy shit, Beck is LOSING IT. He is LOSING IT SO BAD!
Fills my heart with joy.
Mine too. I LOVE it when Beck melts down. He’s abandoning the Republicans now, and just supporting libertarians with “FreePAC”. Hysterical.
yeah, fat boy: tell your listeners to vote for libertarians. Please. Have them vote third party, that would be AWESOME.
You really think Beck will, Brendan? And does he have that kind of clout with the Libbies? Damn, that would be enough to shift NH, NV (lots of individualist libertarians there) and CO completely into the Obama camp.
who knows? I’m just enjoying the meltdown. He’s unloading on W now, for appointing Roberts. Then he unloads on Roberts again. Apparently, Bush was a progressive.
Who knew?
Well, I gues Boehner doesn’t have to worry about the Republicans spiking the football after all.
wow.
Feeling better, BooMan?
You’ve been a mess for the past 48 hours.
So … a Repub idea is adopted by Dems, who are then vilified for it by Repubs, after which it’s barely okayed by a right-leaning Supreme Court.
I’m glad the ACA survived, but the mandate is still a crappy piece of corporatism in the absence of a public option.
However, since the public option was an impossibility, this works for me.
A public option was an “impossibility” that had the support of a huge majority of people, including a majority of registered Republicans.
Yep.
Public opinion is not a house of Congress.
… and corporate lobbyists are.
So … a Repub idea is adopted by Dems
There has never been any point in American history that Republicans supported this idea. The only times they ever claimed to support the idea were situations when they were trying to head off something they opposed even more – when they were trying to kill the Clinton health care plan, and when Governor Romney feared that the Massachusetts legislature was going to pass a more ambitious plan.
You can’t take everything professional politicians say at face value. Sometimes, when they want to kill a proposal but fear the consequences of being seen to do nothing on the issue, they pretend that they are merely opposed to this particular bill, and want to vote for another one.
We can see by the actual performance of the Republicans after the Clinton health care reform effort went down just how much they truly supported this kind of reform – that is, not at all.
Repubs publically supported it in the past. I really don’t give a crap how sincere they were/are. I don’t give a crap how sincere the Dems were/are about it. I’m all out of tea leaves and my crystal ball is cracked, so all I have left is “face value” … and voting records.
Political realism or whatever doesn’t make a shitty part of a piece of legislation any less shitty. Who — at least supposedly — would not have supported the overall package if the mandate hadn’t been included? If the mandate was the result of a supposedly necessary compromise, who made this particular compromise necessary? Who pushed for a mandate? More importantly, who pushed for a mandate while pushing against a public option?
Re: Roberts. Wonder if this means CU can be revisited.
Well…no. The court just explicitly rejected doing so a couple of days ago. Refused to even hear a case. Just flat denial.
Roberts is still no liberal. Nor is Kennedy.
.
It’s all going Obama’s way:
On ACA … welcome to modern society USA!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."At least Will Smith and MIB got a mention;-)
Again I was correct.
I predicted here and over on the orange site that the SCOTUS would NOT overturn the ACA.
so much for all of the hysteria here and there in progressice bloggo world, i.e. the so called massive conservative conspiracy running/influencing the Supreme Court.
Well? again, stop the partisan baloney.
that said, I’m not sure how much of a win this is– because they did sort of smackdown the commerce aspect which I don’t agree with. the health insurance industry IS about interstate commerce; we need more competition in the industry to reduce health care costs.
second, I’m not sure what is going to happen with the cost of premiums. technically with younger, mostly healthy people finally coming into the insurance pool, the cost of insurance premiums overall should drop.
I suspect the insurance companies have the same view, since the stock value of health insurance companies just shot up FIVE percent– after learning of the ruling.
because they did sort of smackdown the commerce aspect which I don’t agree with
Sure, but when else is a “regulation on inactivity” going to come up? It seems pretty specific to the particular issue of health care coverage.
wait and see…
some of this doesn’t kick in till 2014. lots is going to go down between now and then
Feel like I can breathe for the first time in a long time. Next step I’m thinking there’s going to be a nasty payback moment for Holder in this morning’s vote. SCOTUS’ decision no doubt will bring out the bratty tantrum syndrome in Rep’s on the Floor.
The logic for making it a tax and saying that the Commerce clause did not apply was as convoluted as that for Bush v. Gore.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor stood up for use of the Commerce clause.
The Medicaid expansion decision was weird, but was essentially saying you cannot deny Medicaid funds for current Medicaid patients as punishment not to agree to Medicaid expansion.
The insurance companies are relieved. For now. Their world does not dramatically change from what it was yesterday.
Since everyone is now claiming prescience, let me also do that.
I said “elefino”.
I think was prescient in that remark.
…it is rumored that millions of Republicans are rushing to the hospital today to get medical attention for sour grapes consumption.
I see this as one of two possibilities or a combination of the two.
1-The fix is still in for Obama. Romney’s numbers were rising, so the Supremes…or at least some of them…were told to sing a different tune.
2-The initial opponents of Obamacare saw that they could either:
1–Make more money from it than they first realized.
or
2- Have another plan to take it down.
The Supremes as heroes?
I don’t think so.
No one on that court has passed through the system without major compromises to their integrity. Sorry, but here it is. One simply cannot successfully hustle one’s way to the top of this rotted-out system with inextricably allying oneself with the PemaGov controllers. It cannot be done, any more than a store owner or businessman can successfully run a business in a mafia-controlled area without having some serious silent partners.
As above, so below folks.
Sorry, but there it is.
Any other view of this is naivete squared.
Cubed, even.
Yup.
Later…
AG
“1-The fix is still in for Obama. Romney’s numbers were rising, so the Supremes…or at least some of them…were told to sing a different tune”
Your reasoning resembles that of an ignorant douchbag.
Everything else? You’re absolutely right.
That’s “douchebag,” ignoramus.
Call me anything, but spell my name right.
AG
P.S. I love it when my critics are semi-illiterate. It so makes things easier.
Damn you internets!!!!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Douchbag
From the same page:
You shoulda took da fifth.
AG