Will The Supreme Court Strike Down The Affordable Care Act?
Posted by Michelle Moquin on March 26th, 2012
Good morning!
So…there is lots of chitchat in the news about Health Care Reform. Today is the opening day, the first of three days of hearings on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare. Will the Supreme Court, strike it down? I certainly HOPE not and think not, but when it comes to politics one can never be sure of what the outcome might be, especially when we know the Supreme Court is bought and paid for.
Here’s a short write I found on Maddow’s blog on this very subject:
Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare’
Associated PressConservative opponents of ‘Obamacare’ prayed outside the Supreme Court yesterday.
The Supreme Court this morning will kick off the first of three days of hearings on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and interest in the case is as strong as anything we’ve seen in many years. For those who watch the high court closely, however, there’s a striking lack of intrigue about the outcome.
National Journal surveyed former Supreme Court clerks and lawyers who have argued cases before the high court about the health care law, and the consensus was that the Affordable Care is likely to prevail. One respondent said, “I don’t think this case will be nearly as close a case as conventional wisdom now has it. I think the Court will uphold the statute by a lopsided majority.”
That’s not at all an unusual predication. On the contrary, despite the polls and ongoing political fights surrounding “Obamacare,” most legal insiders, even on the right, find it unlikely the Supreme Court will ignore precedent and strike down the law.
But the justices have proven to be unpredictable at times. Jon Chait had a good item the other day on setting expectations.
The legal case against the Affordable Care Act is completely absurd. You can make the argument sound kind of plausible, but if you’re a law-talking guy, you can selectively cull through precedents and pile assumptions onto each other just so in order to reach pretty much any conclusion you want. That’s pretty much what the legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act would do. As a straightforward interpretation of constitutional precedent, it’s just silly.
Legal analysts are not dismissing the case completely, but that’s only because they don’t dismiss the possibility that five Republican-appointed justices will leap at a chance to advance the partisan agenda of their choosing. Jack Balkin, in an article suggesting it’s highly unlikely the law will be found unconstitutional, searches through history and can only find one example of the Court making a ruling so radical and lacking in constitutional basis.
The example was an 1895 case in which the court struck down the federal income tax, with overzealous conservative justices responding to a far-right panic about an imaginary “socialist” threat.
In other words, the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, health care advocates, working families, the uninsured, and Americans who occasionally rely on the American health care system have nothing to worry about, just so long as five conservative justices resist the urge to get caught up in a larger ideological crusade.
Hmm.
Common sense suggests the outcome at the Supreme Court is a no-brainer – of course the court majority will rule in favor of the law. If the justices stick to precedent, it won’t even be close — they’d have to take a truly radical approach to the law to conclude otherwise. But since the Roberts Court is quite capable of radicalism, predictions should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
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Watch it LIVE here:
Readers: Not sure common sense thinking will prevail when STARK is in control. Can we expect something radical? I certainly HOPE not. Those that oppose are certainly praying for it though – One can imagine what’s going on inside the minds of these “praying conservatives” – they try to “pray away the gay”; why not try and “pray away affordable health care for everyone”.
Thoughts? Blog me.
Peace, Love, & Obamacare
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
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michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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March 26th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
It’s all politics. I don’t trust the STARK.
March 26th, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Michelle, you are a pretty woman. I know you were married for a long time, but now that you have tried a man, have you ever considered giving the other half of the human race another look?
Wendi
March 26th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Hafa adai
I’m just curious as to why we haven’t been privy to whatever Cameron is bringing up from below.
——————–
It took Cameron less than three hours to reach his goal, and he said before the voyage that his vertical, torpedo-shaped submarine was designed to zip to the bottom of the trench unlike any other sub.
During an hourlong phone interview last night, Cameron said he explored the trench for about five hours, but turned back after the hydraulics in his mechanical arm malfunctioned.
The malfunction wasn’t necessarily dangerous, but without the arm, Cameron wasn’t able to retrieve as many rock or sediment samples as he had planned. These types of problems are expected on a prototype sub, he said.
=====================
Doesn’t sound too forthcoming to me.
Peter
March 26th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
March 26, 2012
CONTACT: Nikolina Lazic at (608) 260-9713 or nikolina@prwatch.org
ALEC IS EXPOSED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
The tragic and needless shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has drawn national attention to Florida’s draconian “Stand Your Ground Law.”
Last week, CMD’s Brendan Fischer traced the trajectory of the Florida law, from the NRA to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to dozens of states across the nation.
See Brendan’s article here. CMD Director Lisa Graves then went on MSNBC to discuss ALEC’s role in propagating these measures and the corporations like Wal-Mart that stand to profit from increased gun sales.
See Lisa’s interview here. In a related matter, CMD filed a complaint with the Wisconsin ethics board last week asking them to review the manner in which ALEC “scholarships,” provided to legislators to attend meetings with corporate lobbyists, are funded by ALEC corporations and the propriety of other ALEC gifts, such as major league baseball tickets.
Today, Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighed in on the controversy with a shout-out to CMD. We thought you would like to see it.
This week we will unveil a new ALEC archive of open records requests that reveal even more of these connections.
We will continue our focus on the corporations bankrolling ALEC. Stay tuned and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Lobbyists, Guns and Money
Paul Krugman, New York Times
March 26, 2012
Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is.
And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.
Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged).
And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on.
Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.
Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.
ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations.
And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.
What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading.
To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals.
Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.
But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda.
It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.
And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game.
Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.
Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?
Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more.
(The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.
Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.
Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause.
But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on.
And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.
March 27th, 2012 at 5:22 am
Alkys, Gyi11s,Jng, K7/8, Mn1b//2 Vuzok, and Zln7//ce
I need assistance Immediately. We can work our the details in private discussions separately or with whomever you have affiliations with.
Luc
March 27th, 2012 at 5:44 am
Why Gossip Is Good for You
Spreading news about someone behind his or her back can make you look petty and shallow—like if you’re complaining to your spouse about someone’s poor fashion sense or nervous tick.
This is because much of the time, the only thing that gossiping accomplishes is hurting the reputation of the person being talked about.
But gossip doesn’t always fall into that “bad’ category—oftentimes it’s much more complex than that.
Say your friend has been alone for many years and tells you that she’s interested in getting serious with a new boyfriend, but you’ve heard through the grapevine that this particular guy has cheated on numerous past girlfriends.
Do you warn your friend? You don’t know for sure that he was unfaithful, and even if he was, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll stray again.
So…gossip or don’t gossip?
The authors of a new study would say that sharing this type of information would help protect others and also may have a positive effect on your health because it falls under a category that they would call “prosocial” gossip.
To learn more about what that means and why they think it’s a good idea, I called the study’s coauthors, Robb Willer, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Feinberg, a psychology grad student there.
GOSSIP CAN BE THERAPEUTIC
Instead of looking at gossip that’s intended to either advance the position of the gossiper (“My husband just got a six-figure book deal”) or damage someone else’s reputation (“John got promoted before I did only because he’s good-looking”),
the researchers wanted to investigate the type of gossip that warns other people about those who are selfish or untrustworthy.
To do this, they devised a series of experiments to see how and when people would engage in “prosocial” gossip.
In one experiment, researchers hooked up 52 undergraduate male and female subjects to heart-rate monitors and watched their reactions to two people playing a game.
They deliberately arranged for the subjects to observe one player cheating—and when the subjects witnessed this exploitative behavior,
they reported feeling frustrated and their heart rates rose, demonstrating stress, which of course is not good for your health.
But interestingly, participants’ increases in heart rate were calmed when they got the chance to slip a “gossip note” to a new player—a note warning him or her to be careful because someone else was playing selfishly.
And when asked how relieved or better they felt after sending the note, students expressed lower levels of frustration than before.
GO AHEAD AND GOSSIP
I asked Dr. Willer why he thought that passing along this gossipy information made such a difference to the gossiper.
He said that people tend to feel relieved by the idea that a selfish person has been “caught” and therefore will be less able to dupe or hurt others in the future.
In Feinberg’s view, we shouldn’t hesitate to gossip—nor should we feel guilty after we do it—as long as the gossip helps prevent others from being taken advantage of.
Sources: Matthew Feinberg, graduate student in psychology, University of California, Berkeley, and Robb Willer, PhD, assistant professor of sociology and psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
Listing Details
March 27th, 2012 at 5:52 am
Hafa adai,
Whatever Cameron discovered during his dive into the Marianna Trench he is taking it to the top secret naval base Ulithi.
He has left Guam and that is where he will be stationed for the rest of his dives into the Trench.
http://www.pacificnewscenter.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22165:video-ret-lt-walsh-calls-cameron-an-explorer-not-an-adventurer&catid=45:guam-news&Itemid=156
=======================
What could that be? Got any ideas Howie? Whatever it is Microsolf co-founder Paul Allen’s yacht the “Octopus” has brought tons of film.
Peter
March 27th, 2012 at 6:09 am
…sounds like there’s a juicy alien story developing over on Guam, Howie, please come back and tell us…forget about all the Kent’s here and speak to your loving audience, the ones who would not dream of stealing, plagiarizing or doing anything else with your stories other than marvel at your inner circle alien knowledge (should I add a cherry on top of that please?).
And Al, for what it’s worth, I miss you here, too. Hope you’re recuperating well and you’re thinking of firing up that computer again soon.
Mischa, digging your new pic, lookin’ good, mon ami
Luv, Zen Lill