Scalia and the Health Care Mandate

12 January 2012 |permalink | email article

Some time in June the Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the Supreme Court will vote to overturn the health care’s reform law’s requirement that Americans buy health insurance. Antonin Scalia, a Reagan-appointed justice and staunch Republican, is widely believed to vote to overturn the law. But could Scalia deliver a devastating blow to his own side and affirm President Obama? As Talking Points Memo reported, the answer is “judicial precedent.” In its amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court last Friday. the Justice Department cited no fewer than 10 times the 2005 Gonzalez v. Reich case, in which Scalia (and Justice Anthony Kennedy) broke with the court’s conservative wing to hand down what scholars viewed as one of the broadest declaration of federal power under the Commerce Clause: a 6 to 3 ruling decreeing that under the Congress may ban a medical-marijuana patient from from growing cannabis for personal use in California in where it’s legal. Reich was bound to come up either way as it’s seen as the most relevant precedent to the Affordable Care Act, even as the Obama administration is deploying it to box in Scalia specially or conservatives broadly. Scalia’s most recent actions hint that he’s lost his enthusiasm for federal power since Reich: one year ago he signed onto a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas on the court’s refusal to hear a case that would provide the justices an opportunity to narrow the Commerce Clause.

Tea Party

Rasmussen Reports said Wednesday that more voters than ever dislike the Tea Party and 46 percent think it will hurt Republicans in elections this year. But most GOP voters don’t agree and view the Tea Party as good for them in November. On a related topic, as The Hill reported, conservatives are savaging Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for attacking Romney for his years with Bain Capital in South Carolina hard hit by the economic downturn.

Romney’s Response

When Chris Wallace of Fox News asked him whether. given his proposed tax cuts—$700 billion from Medicaid and $127 billion for food stamps—he was concerned that “some people are going to get hurt.” Romney replied, without hesitation, as Katrina vanden Heuvel noted, saying that he didn’t think we hurt the poor “by cutting welfare spending dramatically,so these cuts won’t hurt either. Really?

 

199