President Obama’s Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, seemed to finally have found his stride. Without coughing, or stammering, or gulping down a glass of water, Verrilli delivered his concluding remarks to the Court. “In this population of Medicaid-eligible people who will receive health care that they cannot now afford,” said Verrilli, there will be millions of people with chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. And as a result of the health care that they will get, they will be unshackled from the disabilities that those diseases put on them, and have the opportunity to enjoy the blessings of liberty.”
[…] to Verrilli’s opponent, Paul Clement, this pseudo-constitutional flourish was like a fastball down the middle. “I certainly appreciate what the Solicitor General says, that when you support a policy, you think that the policy spreads the blessings of liberty,” said Clement. “But I would respectfully suggest that it’s a very funny conception of liberty that forces somebody to purchase an insurance policy whether they want it or not. And it’s a very strange conception of federalism that says that we can simply give the States an offer that they can’t refuse.”
Chief Justice Roberts seemed particularly concerned about where the limits of congressional authority.
If Congress can mandate the purchase of a product.
–
I will fight them on the beaches,
I will fight them in the desert,
and I will fight them on the mountain tops,
but they will never ever force me to buy a damn GM Volt…
Scalia Likens Reading Obamacare to Cruel and Unusual Punishment
http://freebeacon.com/scalia-likens-obamacare-to-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia humorously invoked the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishments, when discussing the Obamacare legislation during oral argument today at the Supreme Court.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE SCALIA: And do you really expect the Court to do that? Or do you expect us to — to give this function to our law clerks?
Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?
….
To which I can only add that if Pelosi and Congress didn’t bother to read before they passed Obamacare why should the Chief Justice!?!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
The Broccoli Mandate analog in this FrontPage.com piece highlights the pretzel logic of ObamaCare.
If “the blessings of liberty” are based on health care, it would follow they are based on food, housing and transportation too.
Presumably Americans will soon be required by federal law to have food insurance (entitling them to nutritious meals), housing insurance (entitling them to accommodation) and transportation insurance (entitling them to a car)?
Of course, if such ideas were enacted, the food would soon become a daily packet of freeze-dried potatoes, the housing a small pup tent and the transportation a bottom-of-the-line bicycle.
Gotta control costs, y’know.
1) Candidate Obama said:
“If a mandate was a solution,
we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everyone buy a house.”
–
Then
President Obama took an extraordinary step in his State of the Union address to slam the Supreme Court for ruling unlimited corporate advertisements and donations for campaigns.
Stating that ruling that the Supreme Court had
“opened the floodgates” to special interests and foreign corporations in elections.
–
I guess Oblamer never heard of
‘PAYBACK’
All levels of government and it’s employees, not excluding the Justices of the Supreme Court, should be parties to ObamaCare to enjoy this “Liberty” too.
None of them should be excluded from the opportunity to have a Death Panel decide to give them care and comfort instead of a life saving procedure.
That would give them a lazer-like focus on the issue at hand.
Candidate Obama said:
“If a mandate was a solution,
we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everyone buy a house.”
LOL, Obama and BJ Clinton already did that, except rather than mandating that everyone buy a house they mandated that every mortgage lender rubberstamp mortgage applications regardless of ability to pay.
That’s how they got the subprime mortgage fiasco… which caused the housing bubble which burst…and TA DA! the U.S.A. has the Great Recession.
Hey, people need to be liberated from the horribleness of not having socialists run their lives. That’s what Madison meant, dammit!
I’m cautious about the Supreme Court decision and don’t put much weight in the ‘feelings’ resulting from the three days of in-court argument.
Obama put two new justices in the court, Sotomayer and Kagan, both ‘his’ acolytes, to support him and any of his agendas. These two will not be making decisions based on facts, law and the real limitations imposed on the federal govt by the Constitution but will follow their political alliances and personal ideology of socialism.
I have high hopes the madate clause will be deemed un-constitutional, and therefore, the whole thing will collapse.
But, if somehow it passes I predict Romney will win in a landslide.
,
For those who want to spend the 8$ permonth Hugh Hewitt has about 9 hours of audio discussing and airing the scotus arguments. Very fascinating stuff.
Go to hughniverse.com to sign up.
My understanding is the case is premised upon the interstate commerce clause. The current SCOTUS has been pretty dismal at understanding/deining this clause in the past so I’m not really optomistic – but you never know what the smell of boiling tar and torches can do to persuade a jurorat that the constitution means exactly what it says and needs no reinterpretation.
Lots of Tea Part demoa on this issue – that may do something.
I’m with ET on the caution.
Occam, check out my link above: the bogus commerce clause it discussed there.
Obama put two new justices in the court, Sotomayer and Kagan, both ‘his’ acolytes, to support him and any of his agendas. These two will not be making decisions based on facts, law and the real limitations imposed on the federal govt by the Constitution but will follow their political alliances and personal ideology of socialism.
– ET
That’s close enough for me, ET. Unless it’s possible that he would not share the ideology of his acolytes, which would be passing strange. Yield, ET. Yield!
Dhimmi: Fromt page puts through aa rational and logical argument about the restrictions on the interstate commerce clase as per the many rulings made on it (The commerce clause has been the rally call of every administration hoping to expand Federal authority). I agree the commerce clause restrictions on the feds has already been well defined by SCOTUS this challenge is really redundant – the fact the court took the case instead of refusuing it on the basis the issue was already settled in previous rulings is certainly a sign the current SCOTUS intend to ignore or rewrite previous limits put on federal overreach in commerce.
One reason I’m not optomistic.
If the Commerce Clause was truly intended to give the Federal government anything like the broad authority that has been claimed, why did the Framers even bother writing anything else in the Constitution? If the statists’ argument is to be believed, the Constitution should consist of nothing more than the Commerce Clause.
I am cautiously optimistic that the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional. The truly sad thing, however, is that it will come down to a 5-4 vote. Something so fundamentally at odds with the Constitution should be struck down with no less than a 7-2 majority.
It will be 6 to 3 that Obama is an Unconsitutional black man from Africa, well not really, but It will be totally rejected 6 to 3 and Obama will have to return the 500B that Pelosi took from Medicare (payroll taxes) That money must be returned, it may have went to California under the table
ET has actually said something sensible. (That may be slightly less remarkable than I make it sound, but still.) Obama’s appointees will of course vote for this thing; that’s what they’re there for. And it’s very foolish to imagine that you can predict the outcome of a case from the tone and conduct of the hearing. This will be decided on its merits.
But, that said, the question is whether anybody is going to join the two stooges and approve this. The arguments against it are compelling. And there’s nobody else on the court with any incentive to go against them. None of the other Democrat appointees owe Obama anything, except perhaps a good hard comeuppance. And they’re all acutely aware that the effect of going along with the administration will be, as the administration itself maintains, to concede to Congress unlimited authority. And, when Congress has no limits, the Supreme Court has no role in applying limits. That’s a lot of power and responsibilty to concede away lightly. I can’t see them doing it.
mnd – nope, nope and no.
Remember, I’ve maintained that an intellectual socialist is not the same as a psychological socialist. Obama is the latter. He is not an intellect. Indeed, he hasn’t a coherent thought in his brain, if indeed he even has one.
He exists by and within and only – emotions. He’s a pathological narcissist and since he’s in the political field, then, socialism is the only realm where he could locate himself..er..Himself, because it sets Him up as Ruler over the ruled.
Ah well, you and I, we never give up, do we.