Just saying.
Ann Althouse has a practical take.
More: The best lines from Scalia dissent.
Ben Shapiro Flashback:
Perhaps Roberts is a safe pick. He’s politically conservative and undoubtedly brilliant. He will sail through the Senate without much hassle. But it is shocking to watch many constitutional originalists and textualists abandon their philosophies in favor of cheap politics.
Roberts is not an originalist. There is nothing in his very short jurisprudential record to indicate that his judicial philosophy involves strict fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution. He is not Antonin Scalia, nor is he Clarence Thomas. At best, he is William Rehnquist, for whom he once clerked. While Rehnquist has been a steady political conservative on the bench, the bench should not be about political persuasion: It should be about upholding the explicit words of our Founding Fathers. There is nothing to indicate that Roberts prioritizes the words of the Constitution above other, more immediate political concerns.
Related: SCOTUS today endorses “disparate impact” as a form of discrimination made illegal by the Fair Housing Act.
This, I think, clears the way for President “I hate suburbs and the (white) people who live in them, and I will force them and their money back into the cities” to determine the “complexion” of neighborhoods.
The question for Congress is how are they paying for all these “subsidized” Health Care entitlements. The Act does not have a blank check although the Democrats originally took ~1 trillion from Medicare IOU’s… They spent all that money….
The Cost has already dwarfed (exceeded) the approved budget…
The SCOUS can’t spend money or how much money… A subsidy of $2.00 per would satisfy the Judgment…
Roberts has a medical condition that may open him up to political manipulation…. He is another Bush mistake like Colin P…
“It should be about upholding the explicit words of our Founding Fathers. There is nothing to indicate that Roberts prioritizes the words of the Constitution above other, more immediate political concerns.”
The problem is that the meaning of the words has changed. More accurately, the ideas the words represent have morphed over time.
It was 6-3. Roberts wasn’t the deciding factor in this one even if he did write the majority opinion.
In Canada, Harper thought he was appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court but they all ended up being jackasses. I could point up a couple lawyers who would never stray from the clear meaning of written word but he never asked me. Somebody should have reviewed every decision made by the jackasses before they were nominated because once appointed they are only going to get worse.
Obamacare is a political problem needing a political solution. What SCOTUS has done here with respect to Obamacare is hand the GOP a gift – a ridiculous waste of public money and human lives to campaign against.
The real. longer term, negative to this is the idea that the exact words no longer matter – that everything is subject to interpretation. Millions of people have been sent to jail, or have lost assets in civil actions, on the assumption that words mean what they say. Robert’s wrote an explicit apologia aimed at reducing this risk, but that will probably not suffice until we get another judgment explicitly supporting exact word interpretations.
At one time, appointment for life rendered even the nonpartisan appointees a-partisan, but that was before the left captured academia and the judiciary.
Any non-activist who somehow made it to the bench were quickly banished leaving the only candidates for the Supreme Court in Canada or the US, Marxist moles.
edit:
should read……
“even the most partisan appointees a-partisan,”
While from a US legal perspective this is possibly the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott – and it will have to be undone, for the US to move on, and hopefully without a US Civil War similar to the one Dred Scott caused – the US health care situation was never going to be solved in the Supreme Court, anyway.
It was always going to be about politics. And I don’t think anybody can predict what’s going to happen in 2016. It’s still an open question whether or not the trend in the US toward an all-controlling state can be halted. (I, personally, am pessimistic, but other people smarter than me think the decline is reversible.)
It’s very important for words to have discrete meanings, because what are words but verbalization of ideas and information? When you throw things open so that they can mean whatever is convenient at the moment, they ultimately mean nothing.
It doesn’t matter if the Democrat-majority Congress that enacted Obamacare intended for the subsidies to apply to both federal and state exchanges. The fact is, they didn’t write the law that way. For the Court to decide on any other basis is an usurpation of legislative authority by the judicial branch. They should have ruled that the law means what its text states, and if that meaning is in disagreement with legislative intent then it is up to the legislature to correct it through normal legislative processes.
This is Red Queen insanity. The damage this ruling does to American jurisprudence cannot be overstated because it goes right to the very premise of separation of powers and craps all over it.
It’s kind of funny…I participate in a bi-weekly conference call on communication strategy and communication in general. One of the other participants is a 50 year DC vet and a lawyer/lobbyist.(I’m a canuck). We were discussing statute law a week or so ago and I was talking about the “Interpretation Act” and the special “interpretations” appended to our statutes in Canada. He was surprised to learn that we had such a beast and assured me there is no analogous reference in the US…perhaps it’s time.
So if words mean nothing does that render ‘hate speech’ inapplicable?
I am crossing my fingers that no one dies or retires on the scotia bench before Obama is out the door
Then the new president has an open field for appointing – majority house and senate.
And I have the perfect next appointee:
Ted Cruz
To paraphrase Inigo Montoya: You keep using those words. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I especially like Scalia’s words “interpretive jiggery-pokery”. Similar to the legislative jiggery-pokery used by the Democrats to get this Obamanation-abomination passed in the Senate.
The Supremes have decided that since Ms Pelosis and her confreres, in the entire legislative branch are incapable of the following skills:
1. Readin
2. Righten
3. Cipherin
that they will have to step in and correct these dummies who couldn’t pass grade school.
Why the entire legislative branch of the United States of America has done been “Grubered”!
They needed the judicial branch to ‘find out what’s in it’!
Obamacare is now trademarked as “SCOTUScare” by Antonin Scalia because nobody in his right mind could have written such an unintelligible “Franken-Bill” as to be entirely constitutionally invalid by normal legal metrics.
Roberts Court Tortures Legal Meaning
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/25/roberts-court-tortures-law-to-save-obamacare-
again/
Scalia sums up: “Under all the normal rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation always seem to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved… We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group ‘True North’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/25/roberts-court-tortures-law-to-save-obamacare-again/
Whoops updated Ben Shapiro link…
This is an excellent ruling by the Kleptocrats of the Supreme Court.
It is now US law, that the laws as passed are both unknown and unknowable.
As words mean whatever our dear leaders need them to mean, we mere taxpayers have zero chance of compliance.
Rebellion is the only logical reaction, join the untaxed, unregulated economy.
You will be found guilty of unpatriotic thinking regardless of how you act, so give all these parasites the respect they deserve.
It was G.W. Bush’s incompetent Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who disregarded the mental health problems of John Roberts, seizures & his medication. That was a huge mistake to put him on the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). We now have two zombies, Roberts & Ginsberg…. See last paragraphs of MSNBC RE: Seizures
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obamacare-decision-turns-john-roberts-conservative-dream-nightmare
The Queen of Hearts: This girl is the culprit. There’s no doubt about it. And the reason is… because I say so, that’s why!
Alice: That is so unfair!
When words have no intersubjectively agreed upon definition then there is no law is the commonly understood sense. What we are getting here from SCOTUS is the law of the pre Magna Carta Sovereign. A State is not a State. It is the law because they say so, that’s why!
Perhaps some members of SCOTUS may find themselves “Breitbarted” prior to the end of Zero’s term. Just sayin’.
GO AWAY OBAMA,GO AWAY JOE BIDEN,GO AWAY UNITED NATIONS
Exactly and that is why I detest progressives, even progressive conservatives who will side with the left when the chips are down.
Roberts is a progressive and if there is any doubt he proved it today.
The Supreme courts in the US and Canada should both be destroyed. I want to elect my representatives! I do not want have them appointed by the PM or anyone else. I doubt anyone on Main Street in any city or town in Canada could name even one of our supremes or would know how many are on the bench at any time. And their rulings are immediately the ‘Law’.
Anyone who thinks the Republicans will ever repeal Obamacare are fools. Congressional Republicans are not conservative. They have not been conservative for a long, long time. They are big-business cronyist power-brokers, who use conservative talking points to get themselves elected into their cushy seats of powers, from which they dole out favours to their donors. They are also scared spitless of the Democrats and will not fight them, even as the Democrats openly profess their mortal hatred for them and profane them at every turn.
Obamacare will never die. Republicans will start running on “fixing it”, “making it work better” – hell, Romney himself ran on “repeal and REPLACE”! But it’s all kabuki theatre anyway. The Republicans are enemies of freedom in the United States just as the Democrats are.
America would be best served at this point by an asteroid falling on Washington DC. Nothing else will ever fix that putrid swamp.
You are missing the fact that the Supreme Courts don’t enforce any Laws.. They can’t order enforcement… If respect for their judgment fail, they are toothless slobbering fools. The States will do what ever the people demand…. The Congress has a role and should reorganize the SCOTUS to eliminate the mindless “partisan” division, political direction & glad-handing has no place in a Nation of Laws (Blind Scale)
The indifference to existing laws by Obama are what every State should practice…We can’t force Obama to enforce immigration or Gun laws. The F*** ing SCOTUS laws apply to what the State (Government) “can’t” do.. “Can’t prohibit same sex marriage”, but they can pass NEW laws prohibiting sodomy..Etc… Etc