The Week in Blog: Flavor of the Week (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)

[Bloggingheads]

[bkjazfan]

I think a Supreme Court decision on any facet of the Obama Healthcare Law will have none to little impact on the '12 presidential election. It's going to be about the economy. Today the Economic Cycle Research Institute said that another recession in the near future is imminent.

I know in the state of California there are some rather large agricultural communities that have depresssion level unemployment stats - 25% and above. In fact, there are many areas in the country that are suffering from this same plight since the '08 crash. Obamacare is strictly a side show issue and will remain so through the election.

[piscivorous]

Does moving it to the Supreme Court remove it, to the extent it will only be in political stories, not hard news stories of this panel or that panel has found it constitutional or not. From what I see it will be hard news only three times, The Court accepting the case, the Court hearing the case and the Court rendering its decision. It will also probably deprive it of some of its relevance to the political conversations as it will be in the process of being a decided, thus closed at the main street level of political discourse, matter.

[badhatharry]

Originally Posted by bkjazfan

I think a Supreme Court decision on any facet of the Obama Healthcare Law will have none to little impact on the '12 presidential election. It's going to be about the economy. Today the Economic Cycle Reserarch Institute said that another recession in the near future is imminent.

I know in the state of California there are some rather large agricultural communities that have depresssion level unemployment stats - 25% and above. In fact, there are many areas in the country that are suffering from this same plight since the '08 crash. Obamacare is strictly a side show issue and will remain so through the election.

So you think Obamacare is unrelated to the economy? Personally, I think the passage of Obamacare brought a lot of angst to the American public and uncertainty to the business sector. Does anyone really know what's in it and how it's going to affect us?

[bkjazfan]

Originally Posted by badhatharry

So you think Obamacare is unrelated to the economy? Personally, I think the passage of Obamacare brought a lot of angst to the American public and uncertainty to the business sector. Does anyone really know what's in it and how it's going to affect us?

Some argue that the Obama Administration spending a year and a half on this issue while the country was in a steep economic decline was unwise.

I found the interview with BET founder Robert Johnson informative. He said that Washington has created a lot of uncertainty for the business community and they are holding their cards close to their vests until the D.C. pols get their act together.

[jimM47]

Re: the ObamaCare litigation:

* There's no need to look for political motives in the decision to hasten the appeal. I think it is in Obama's interest to get a decision quickly, before the issue has fully percolated in the Circuit Courts, and while the case might present "vehicle problems" to suck up some of the Court's energy.

* The Court will have to rule on the standing question, at least as far as to find one party with standing. The federal courts can only decide a case where they have subject-matter jurisdiction (which requires standing) and they have the obligation to test their subject-matter jurisdiction on their own initiative.

* The severability issue can go to both the standing arguments and the merits arguments. Some of the litigants clearly have standing to challenge the perfectly constitutional parts of the law, and there is a question whether they can try to defeat those parts of the law by challenging a part of the law that does not injure them.

* Most importantly, the severability issue goes to whether, if the mandate is struck down, what other parts of the law do down with it. Potentially the Supreme Court could remand this question to the lower court, but if the mandate is struck down, the severability issue has to be decided one way or the other, and the question is likely to come to the Court eventually.

* The fact that there is no explicit severability clause in the law doesn't make the mandate inseverable in the least. The Court will have to analyze whether the contested provision is so interdependent with other provisions that they must stand or fall together. I see basically no chance the whole law goes down. The real question is whether guaranteed-issue/community-rating goes down with the mandate or not.

* The 2005 case Bill refers to is Gonzales v. Raich, in which Scalia wrote a concurrence attempting to harmonize and explain existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence. That concurring opinion is what litigators, theorists and lower court judges have looked to in making their arguments. So I doubt Scalia is gonna be the one who gets pealed off. And Thomas is clearly voting against the mandate. The other three conservatives are a bigger question. Roberts and Alito weren't on the Court in 2005, and Kennedy did not join Scalia's concurrence.

* Still, Justice Kennedy's jurisprudence has been characterized as "Never say Never." The government can always do something, but it can never do everything. He refused to expand the "substantial effects" doctrine to non-economic laws in Morrison and Lopez, but he also refused to carve out an exception to it in Raich. There's reason to think the anti-mandate argument is the right one to catch the upswing on the teeter-totter.

[badhatharry]

Originally Posted by bkjazfan

Some argue that the Obama Administration spending a year and a half on this issue while the country was in a steep economic decline was unwise.

I found the interview with BET founder Robert Johnson informative. He said that Washington has created a lot of uncertainty for the business community and they are holding their cards close to their vests until the D.C. pols get their act together.

This brings me back to the Pinkerton thread and I was thinking about this today. Our country is being ruled by an elite which doesn't have a ****ing clue about how things work, why they work and how to get things to work.

They are highly educated know-nothings. They know how to give speeches and opine about what's really wrong about America and Americans. We need to throw the bums out!

I feel so much better, now

[badhatharry]

Originally Posted by jimM47

Re: the ObamaCare litigation:

How about the juicy parts? Elena Kagan? Clarence Thomas?

[harkin]

So funny watching the msm trying to portray Cain as a racist. Imagine the nerve of a black man putting the 'brainwashed' tag on a group that has allowed one political party to not only turn it into poverty slaves but also votes for more of it at over 90%.

Doubling down on funny, these are the same folks who attempted (successfully) to co-ordinate the media's response to Obama's hateful, racist preacher.

Did Bill Scher really proudly proclaim that Van Jones was attending this or that conference? Yesterday, Bill Maher did the same thing, saying that conservatives hate him, without ever addressing why they hate him. Markos Moulitsas of the very liberal site Daily Kos bans anyone who advocates 9/11 truthism. Others should adopt this practice, no one who advocates 9/11 truthism should be treated with any respect.

[AemJeff]

Originally Posted by harkin

So funny watching the msm trying to portray Cain as a racist. Imagine the nerve of a black man putting the 'brainwashed' tag on a group that has allowed one political party to not only turn it into poverty slaves but also votes for more of it at over 90%.

Doubling down on funny, these are the same folks who attempted (successfully) to co-ordinate the media's response to Obama's hateful, racist preacher.

It's even funnier to read harkin inventing narratives and explanations to match what he already believes regardless of, you know, actual events in the world.