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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on June 29, 2012, 05:07:38 AM
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I am sure their collective response is :
FU333
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Does it suck to hate yourself and this country so much?
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Does it suck to hate yourself and this country so much?
Yeah - don't we all love the idea that the government can now tax you for inactivity. ::) ::) ::)
Fucking brilliant the stupidity you obama cultists embrace w open arms.
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So it does hurt. Have you ever considered seeking treatment?
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So it does hurt. Have you ever considered seeking treatment?
::)
Whatever. Petty stalking insults is all you got.
This decision is a disaster and yet because its your god king and cult messiah you cheer it on.
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Does it suck to hate yourself and this country so much?
My friend and I were talking about this yesterday (Iraqi Veteran wounded in combat)
We were talking about how divisive this country is. What it takes to truly be an American. Its not just some shit to say. Some bull shit to put on the back of your car. To light Fireworks on the 4th. etc.
To be an American is to know that you dont have to "like" all of the rulings but at the end of the day, We do things the American Way. The court systems, the Branches of government. Our whole process. You dont have to like it all the time. But the great part of being American is that there is a process put in place if you dont like the law.
This child 3333 isnt a Patriot, not in the least. If he doesnt get his way, he starts yelling Tyrant, and Ghetto Thug trash...like seriously, this is how you refer to the elected leader of your country, Shit, that says more about the international viiew of America and its citizens than any Obama Bow. (big whoop)
I just think its really easy to say Im an American, I love this country, But not like anything its founded on and strives to continue.
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My friend and I were talking about this yesterday (Iraqi Veteran wounded in combat)
We were talking about how divisive this country is. What it takes to truly be an American. Its not just some shit to say. Some bull shit to put on the back of your car. To light Fireworks on the 4th. etc.
To be an American is to know that you dont have to "like" all of the rulings but at the end of the day, We do things the American Way. The court systems, the Branches of government. Our whole process. You dont have to like it all the time. But the great part of being American is that there is a process put in place if you dont like the law.
This child 3333 isnt a Patriot, not in the least. If he doesnt get his way, he starts yelling Tyrant, and Ghetto Thug trash...like seriously, this is how you refer to the elected leader of your country, Shit, that says more about the international viiew of America and its citizens than any Obama Bow. (big whoop)
I just think its really easy to say Im an American, I love this country, But not like anything its founded on and strives to continue.
Whatever - when the next president you detest forces to to purchase things against you will or face a tax, you will understand why so many people are pissed off over this.
And 95er please - Do you even know what 4th of July was all about?
People were sick of the govt forcing taxes and bullshit on them and they revolted. Going along with everything these thugs like GWB, Obama, Pelosi, Mcconnell, Boehner want to do is not patriotic, its embracing tyranny.
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Evidence Emerges Mentally Unstable Roberts Changed His Vote At The Last Minute
Jun 28, 2012 3 Comments Pat Dollard
Excerpted from ABC News: ABC News: Did Chief Justice John Roberts decide to join the court’s liberal wing and uphold the individual mandate at the very last minute?
Related – NY Times: Roberts Medication Causes “Mental Slowing”
That’s the theory floated by Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Boulder, and Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economics professor and former Treasury Department official under President Clinton. Campos wrote Thursday in Salon that the dissent had a triumphant tone, as if it were written as a majority opinion, and that the four conservative justices incorrectly refer to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion as a “dissent.”
“No less than 15 times in the space of the next few pages, the dissent refers to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion as ‘Justice Ginsburg’s dissent,’” Campos wrote.
DeLong pointed out on his popular blog that in Justice Clarence Thomas two-page note on the dissent, he refers to the conservatives’ dissent as the “joint opinion” instead of the “joint dissent.”
Campos hypothesized that the conservative justices may have intentionally left these typos as a way of signaling to the outside world that Chief Justice Roberts abandoned them at the last moment.
Lyle Denniston, the long-term courtwatcher who writes for SCOTUSblog, tells Yahoo News that he “can’t account for the wording of the Thomas opinion.”
But Dennison disagrees with Campos that it’s incorrect for the dissenters to refer to Ginsburg’s opinion as a dissent. Ginsburg wrote that she thought the individual mandate should have been upheld under the Commerce Clause, and she was in the minority in that respect.
Kennedy and the four conservative justices, including Roberts, said the mandate would be illegal under the Commerce Clause. Roberts upheld it as a tax, instead, with the four liberal justices partially concurring.
“My own sense, from reading the Roberts opinion, is that it was written as a majority opinion in all of its drafts, and that various Justices joined or dropped off,” Denniston told Yahoo News. “I think he was determined to try to uphold some key parts of the law, if he could find a way, partly because…he has grown concerned about the public perception that his Court is a partisan-driven Court.”
http://patdollard.com/2012/06/evidence-emerges-mentally-unstable-roberts-changed-his-vote-at-the-last-minute/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Roberts is a real piece of shit if that is why he ruled like he did since even he knows the mandate is pure slavery.
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My friend and I were talking about this yesterday (Iraqi Veteran wounded in combat)
We were talking about how divisive this country is. What it takes to truly be an American. Its not just some shit to say. Some bull shit to put on the back of your car. To light Fireworks on the 4th. etc.
To be an American is to know that you dont have to "like" all of the rulings but at the end of the day, We do things the American Way. The court systems, the Branches of government. Our whole process. You dont have to like it all the time. But the great part of being American is that there is a process put in place if you dont like the law.
This child 3333 isnt a Patriot, not in the least. If he doesnt get his way, he starts yelling Tyrant, and Ghetto Thug trash...like seriously, this is how you refer to the elected leader of your country, Shit, that says more about the international viiew of America and its citizens than any Obama Bow. (big whoop)
I just think its really easy to say Im an American, I love this country, But not like anything its founded on and strives to continue.
No, this little bitch is the one wishing a nuke would go off in his country or that people who don't share his delusional political views are killed. Does that sound patriotic or any sane and rational? No. Sounds like someone who hates their own life so much due to insecurities and self loathing that they want everyone else to be as miserable as they are. Add in his evident closet queerness and fear of interacting with life off the internet and you have nothing but a sad little husk of a man. Being unemployed, living in a shitty neighborhood and belonging to a pissy minority class just adds fuel to the fire.
With Obamacare at least he can now go and seek treatment for his mental condition.
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Whatever - when the next president you detest forces to to purchase things against you will or face a tax, you will understand why so many people are pissed off over this.
And 95er please - Do you even know what 4th of July was all about?
People were sick of the govt forcing taxes and bullshit on them and they revolted. Going along with everything these thugs like GWB, Obama, Pelosi, Mcconnell, Boehner want to do is not patriotic, its embracing tyranny.
Then leave. Let's face it. You ain't accomplishing shit with your epic cut and paste quest on here. Most people that do not like the way their gov't exists actually do something about it. You are too fucking lazy and chickenshit to go out and try to change it.
Ranting on the internet and dragging every little article in existence on other sites over here really isn't doing anything other than showing the rest of us what a pathetic crybaby you are.
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Then leave. Let's face it. You ain't accomplishing shit with your epic cut and paste quest on here. Most people that do not like the way their gov't exists actually do something about it. You are too fucking lazy and chickenshit to go out and try to change it.
Ranting on the internet and dragging every little article in existence on other sites over here really isn't doing anything other than showing the rest of us what a pathetic crybaby you are.
The colonists didn't leave, they fought it beat the red coats despite overwhelming odds.
If you want this country to be a socialist failure like greece - the least you can do is be open about it.
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Whatever - when the next president you detest forces to to purchase things against you will or face a tax, you will understand why so many people are pissed off over this.
And 95er please - Do you even know what 4th of July was all about?
People were sick of the govt forcing taxes and bullshit on them and they revolted. Going along with everything these thugs like GWB, Obama, Pelosi, Mcconnell, Boehner want to do is not patriotic, its embracing tyranny.
Son dont even attempt to test my knowledge of American history. I can tell by your posts that youve mainly Glossed over history. You have Zero clue of that it actually takes to be an American.
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Son dont even attempt to test my knowledge of American history. I can tell by your posts that youve mainly Glossed over history. You have Zero clue of that it actually takes to be an American.
Right - according to you we must embrace the politicians as god kings and accept anything and everything they want to do.
Just go along with and sit silent right?
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Right - according to you we must embrace the politicians as god kings and accept anything and everything they want to do.
Just go along with and sit silent right?
That shows you dont read at all. In our country, America, You dont like a law, You Vote in a rep that changes it. I didnt say anything about accept anything they do. In the very post above i addressed that. Did you even read it. Or are you making up shit.
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That shows you dont read at all. In our country, America, You dont like a law, You Vote in a rep that changes it. I didnt say anything about accept anything they do. In the very post above i addressed that. Did you even read it. Or are you making up shit.
You don't get it do you? The SC yesterday, for the first time EVER, just gave the government the power to compel any activity whatsoever or face a tax.
Even if ObamaCare is repealed, the precedent has been now set in stone that you are a slave to these politicians whims and they they own you and your life and every activity from cradle to grave.
You and lurker might be ok with that, most of us are not.
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You don't get it do you? The SC yesterday, for the first time EVER, just gave the government the power to compel any activity whatsoever or face a tax.
Even if ObamaCare is repealed, the precedent has been now set in stone that you are a slave to these politicians whims and they they own you and your life and every activity from cradle to grave.
You and lurker might be ok with that, most of us are not.
I dont like it. Ive said that for a while. Why do you say im ok
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I dont like it. Ive said that for a while. Why do you say im ok
Maybe posting mocking pictures of Magic J maybe?
See, i am looking at the bigger picture here. The same way I hate obama and pelosi having these powers, is the same as i dont want GWB or Romney having those powers.
So while people cheer obama being able to force people to purchase insurance or face a tax, the next president will have the power to force people to by cars, guns, books, computers, gym memberships, literally anything. I personally think that power is the end of this nation as having any semblence of freedom for the individual.
Just because people think they are getting something good cause its "health care", does not mean that how they arrived at the result isnt absolutely terrifying at the implications.
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Maybe posting mocking pictures of Magic J maybe?
See, i am looking at the bigger picture here. The same way I hate obama and pelosi having these powers, is the same as i dont want GWB or Romney having those powers.
So while people cheer obama being able to force people to purchase insurance or face a tax, the next president will have the power to force people to by cars, guns, books, computers, gym memberships, literally anything. I personally think that power is the end of this nation as having any semblence of freedom for the individual.
Just because people think they are getting something good cause its "health care", does not mean that how they arrived at the result isnt absolutely terrifying at the implications.
I post pics of Magic to Laugh at You personally.. its funny watching you meltdown.
Ive never said i was for ObamaCare...
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I post pics of Magic to Laugh at You personally.. its funny watching you meltdown.
Ive never said i was for ObamaCare...
and that's fine - i think if there was ever a legit time to meltdown over something politically - this is it.
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The colonists didn't leave, they fought it beat the red coats despite overwhelming odds.
If you want this country to be a socialist failure like greece - the least you can do is be open about it.
And that is what you picture yourself doing? "Fighting" it by sitting inside on the internet 24/7 cutting and paste your crap on an internet forum devoted to bodybuilders? ::)
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and that's fine - i think if there was ever a legit time to meltdown over something politically - this is it.
Until tomorrow. When there is something new for you to meltdown all over again. And if there isn't, you will fabricate something.
Your "the sky is falling" routine became old 60,000 posts ago.
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And that is what you picture yourself doing? "Fighting" it by sitting inside on the internet 24/7 cutting and paste your crap on an internet forum devoted to bodybuilders? ::)
I already am signed up w local tea party group, part of election fraud team w other lawyers for election day, etc.
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and that's fine - i think if there was ever a legit time to meltdown over something politically - this is it.
dude you meltdown like every day
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dude you meltdown like every day
We never ever had such a treasonous economically inept communist muslim piece of shit as president as we do now.
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I already am signed up w local tea party group, part of election fraud team w other lawyers for election day, etc.
They have an app for that?
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We never ever had such a treasonous economically inept communist muslim piece of shit as president as we do now.
I can't wait to see your meltdown when he taxes internet posts and imaginary girlfriends.
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We never ever had such a treasonous economically inept communist muslim piece of shit as president as we do now.
But couldnt it have been struck down by the SC... so.....um... So is Roberts a piece of shit.
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But couldnt it have been struck down by the SC... so.....um... So is Roberts a piece of shit.
Roberts is a piece of shit and a traitor because he just single handidly gave the govt limitless power to coerce behavior and consumer choices by the taxing authority.
And yes, GWB was a piece of shit too.
Worst back to back presidencies in decades.
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so... is this one continuious meltdown or can i file this as a seperate one from yesterday?
Or is your life as a whole a meltdown. Please clarify this.
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so... is this one continuious meltdown or can i file this as a seperate one from yesterday?
Or is your life as a whole a meltdown. Please clarify this.
This is going to be looked back as a watershed moment for loss of freedom for the individual years from now.
And guess what else this does? Big Corporations who lobby the govt can now get these congresscunts and the potus for force us to buy shit or face a tax.
For example - lets say Apple lobbies obama and the congress to force people to buy an ipad or face a tax penalty - legal
Ruger lobbies Romney to force Americans to buy firearms or face a tax - legal
Chevy wants to recoup its losses by forcing us to buy a volt or face a tax - legal
Solyndra lobbies obama to force americans to buy its solar panels or face a tax - legal
NYSC lobbies Romney to force people to buy gym memberships or face a tax - legal
Monsanto lobbies Obama to force american to buy tomatos, salads, etc or face a tax - legal
Get it yet? This is the genie let out of the lamp yesterday by Roberts. And yes - he is a piece of shit. This is even worse than had they found the mandate legal under the commerce clause.
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The Roberts Rules
The Chief Justice rewrites ObamaCare in order to save it. .
Thursday was destined to be an historic day for American liberty, and it was, though the new precedent is grim. The remarkable decision upholding the Affordable Care Act is shot through with confusion—the mandate that's really a tax, except when it isn't, and the government whose powers are limited and enumerated, except when they aren't. One thing is clear: This was a one-man show, and that man is John Roberts.
Former solicitor general Paul Clement on the legal implications of the Supreme Court decision. Photo: Associated Press
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The Chief Justice ruled that ObamaCare's mandate violated the Commerce Clause, joined by the Court's conservative bloc, but he also said that the mandate fell within Congress's power to tax, joined by the Court's liberal bloc. In practice this is a restraint on federal power without real restraint—and, worse, the Chief Justice had to rewrite the statute Congress passed in order to salvage it. The ruling will stand as one of the great what-might-have-beens of American constitutional law.
The novel question raised by ObamaCare's command to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty—the first-ever purchase mandate in U.S. history—was whether Congress could create commerce in order to regulate it. In his 1-4-4 opinion, Chief Justice Roberts writes that construing the Commerce Clause as the Obama Administration argued "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. . . . The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, and for over 200 years both our decisions and Congress's actions have reflected this understanding."
Note that this rejection of federal compulsion, which the four conservatives supported albeit in dissent, is the same one that the liberal legal establishment spent years deriding as frivolous and beyond debate: Of course Washington has carte blanche to do whatever it wants to do. "That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned," the Chief Justice writes, before going on to envision it himself by grounding the mandate in Congress's power to "lay and collect Taxes."
According to Chief Justice Roberts, the penalty is merely a tax on not owning health insurance, no different from "buying gasoline or earning income," and it thus complies with the Constitution. This a large loophole. The result is that Washington has unlimited power to impose new purchase mandates and the courts will find them constitutional if Congress calls them taxes, or even if it calls them something else and judges call them taxes.
That was true with ObamaCare. The Pelosi Democrats explicitly structured the mandate as a regulatory "penalty." Congress voted down a direct tax in 2009. Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1920s and 1930s define penalties and taxes as mutually exclusive and critically different.
Every lower court that heard the health-care cases rejected the taxing argument. Administration lawyers devoted only 21 lines of their reply brief to this argument and it barely came up at oral arguments. The Chief Justice in effect revised the statute in order to find it constitutional.
But if the mandate is really a tax, why doesn't the law known as the Anti-Injunction Act apply, which says that taxes can't be challenged legally until they've been collected? The Chief Justice actually rules that the mandate is a tax under the Constitution and a mandate for the purposes of tax law.
In their brutal (and, in a rarity, jointly signed) dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito write that the Chief Justice's logic "is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. . . . One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression." They score the Chief Justice for carrying "verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."
Justice Kennedy dissented angrily from the bench, and it is to his credit that he defended the federalist system of shared powers that is the hallmark of his years on the Court. The particular tragedy is that four Justices would have overturned not merely the purchase mandate but all of ObamaCare as unconstitutional. Only John Roberts prevented it.
One telling note is that the dissent refers repeatedly to "Justice Ginsburg's dissent" and "the dissent" on the mandate, but of course they should be referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurrence. This wording and other sources suggest that there was originally a 5-4 majority striking down at least part of ObamaCare, but then the Chief Justice changed his mind.
The Justices may never confirm this informed speculation. But if it is true, this is far more damaging to the Court's institutional integrity that the Chief Justice is known to revere than any ruling against ObamaCare. The political class and legal left conducted an extraordinary campaign to define such a decision as partisan and illegitimate. If the Chief Justice capitulated to this pressure, it shows the Court can be intimidated and swayed from its constitutional duties. If this was a play to compete with John Marshall's legacy, the result is closer to William Brennan's.
The Court did rule 7-2 against ObamaCare's expansion of Medicaid, the supposedly voluntary federal-state program that once covered only the poor. The majority included liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, who held this expansion to be unconstitutional because the feds commandeered state resources.
The problem is that this also involved rewriting the law. The majority merely created an opt-out that Governors and states could elect to preserve some measure of independent control, instead of telling Congress to start over. Still, this is the first time the Court has found a law enacted under Congress's spending power to be unconstitutionally coercive.
But this and even the five votes limiting Congress under the Commerce Clause pale against the Chief Justice's infinitely elastic and dangerous interpretation of the taxing power. Nancy Pelosi famously said we need to pass ObamaCare to find out what's in it. It turns out we also needed John Roberts to write his appendix.
A version of this article appeared June 29, 2012, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Roberts Rules.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304058404577494400059173634.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop#articleTabs%3Dcomments
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ObamaCare Ruling: Pure Fraud and No Due Process
Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On June 28, 2012 @ 3:39 pm In Uncategorized | 98 Comments
Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided that Americans have no right to due process. Indeed, the Court not only upheld a fraud perpetrated on the public — it became a willing participant.
The assessment charged for failure to comply with ObamaCare’s “individual mandate,” which requires Americans to purchase health insurance, was presented to the country by the administration and the Democratic Congress as a penalty assessed for lawlessness — i.e., for refusing to honor this new legal requirement. It was strenuously denied by proponents that they were raising taxes.
The Obama administration, in particular, was adamant that the assessment was a penalty, not a tax: the president himself indignantly objected to a suggestion to the contrary in an ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos. Obama officials also vigorously maintained that there had been no violation of the president’s oft-repeated campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. Moreover, as stingingly noted in the joint dissenting opinion of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, the Democratic majority in Congress rejected an earlier version of the bill that became ObamaCare precisely because it imposed a tax — lawmakers intentionally substituted a mandate with a penalty for failure to comply so they could continue to contend that no one’s taxes were being raised.
Chief Justice Roberts claims that Congress simply used the wrong label. That is legerdemain. This is not a case in which Congress was confused, or inadvertently used the wrong term under circumstances where the error wasn’t called to its attention. The tax-or-penalty question was a hotly contested issue. As the dissent points out, it is one thing for a court to construe as a tax an exaction that “bore an agnostic label that does not entail the significant constitutional consequences of a penalty — such as ‘license’…. But we have never — never – treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’”
Let’s say that, back when I was a prosecutor, I tried and convicted a man on a charge of conspiring to sell narcotics. I can prove he was conspiring, but it was really to sell stolen property. I convict him but, on appeal, the court holds, “The prosecutor’s evidence that it was drugs the defendant conspired to sell is wholly lacking.” At that point, the conviction has to be dismissed, and if I want to try him a second time, this time for conspiring to sell stolen property, I’ve got to indict him and start the whole process over again.
Let’s suppose, however, that the appeals court instead said, “Eh, drugs, stolen property, what’s the big whup? You just wrote the wrong commodity into the indictment. So let’s not bother with a whole new trial at which you’d have to prove the correct charge to a jury. Let’s just rewrite the indictment and pretend that it says ‘stolen property’ instead of ‘narcotics.’ Then we can uphold the conviction and call it a day.”
That would never be permitted to happen — not even to a crook of whose guilt we were certain. It would be an outrageous violation of due process, a conviction obtained by false pretenses, that would not be allowed to stand.
Yet this is essentially what Chief Justice Roberts & Co. did. They said the American people are not entitled to an honest legislative process, one in which they can safely assume that when Congress intentionally uses words that have very different meanings and consequences — like tax and penalty — and when Congress adamantly insists that the foundation of legislation is one and not the other, the Court will honor, rather than rewrite, the legislative process. Meaning: if Congress was wrong, the resulting law will be struck down, and Congress will be told that, if it wants to pass the law, it has to do it honestly.
Just as an appeals court may not legitimately rewrite an indictment and revise what happened at a trial, neither may it legitimately rewrite a statute and fabricate an imaginary congressional record. But today, the Supreme Court rewrote a law — which it has no constitutional authority to do — and treated it as if it were forthrightly, legitimately enacted. Further, it shielded the political branches from accountability for raising taxes, knowing full well that, had Obama and the Democrats leveled with the public that ObamaCare entailed a huge tax hike, it would never have had the votes to pass.
The ObamaCare mandate was enacted as a penalty flowing from Congress’s Commerce Clause power. It has been upheld as a tax flowing from Congress’s power to tax-and-spend under the General Welfare Clause. As the dissent sharply demonstrates, the contention that the mandate could have been enacted as a tax is frivolous. Meanwhile our country, trillions of dollars in debt and rapidly sinking further, desperately needs a debate about the limits of Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare.
Madison — correctly in my view — thought the General Welfare Clause (which is in the preamble to article I, section 8 — it is not a separate, enumerated power) was simply an affirmation that Congress had the power to tax and spend to achieve the specific grants of power exactingly set forth in that section. Hamilton, by contrast, argued that the General Welfare Clause was an independent (i.e., not restricted to the enumerated powers), open-ended grant of authority to the national government to tax and spend on anything that would support someone’s idea of the overall betterment of society. Madison rightly contended that Hamilton’s interpretation would defeat the purpose of enumerating Congress’s powers — namely, to limit it to only these functions and no others. It would also usurp the rights and authority of the states and the people, in whom were retained all rights and authority not expressly assigned to the national government by the Constitution.
During the New Deal, under FDR’s court-packing threats, the Supreme Court adopted Hamilton’s view — enabling Congress to enact the New Deal, the Great Society, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and innumerable other programs for which there is no enumerated power in the Constitution. These programs are unsustainable and leading us over the economic cliff, besides intruding on the domain of state power. Had ObamaCare been honestly presented as a tax, or had the Court acted properly by striking it down as an illegitimate use of the commerce power and telling Congress that if it wanted to pass the bill as a tax it would have to pass the bill as a tax, our dire financial straits might have forced this much needed debate about the limits of congressional welfare power.
We have now lost that opportunity through fraud: fraud in the legislative action, and fraud in the judicial review. Due process would not allow this to be done to a criminal, but the Supreme Court has decided that Americans will have to live with it.
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Article printed from Ordered Liberty: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/28/obamacare-ruling-pure-fraud-and-no-due-process
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Getbig has gone stupid today i see..
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Getbig has gone stupid today i see..
Ends justifies the means for the obamabots. Got it.
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Ends justifies the means for the obamabots. Got it.
Who is the Obamabot...
Explain why?
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Whatever - when the next president you detest forces to to purchase things against you will or face a tax, you will understand why so many people are pissed off over this.
And 95er please - Do you even know what 4th of July was all about?
People were sick of the govt forcing taxes and bullshit on them and they revolted. Going along with everything these thugs like GWB, Obama, Pelosi, Mcconnell, Boehner want to do is not patriotic, its embracing tyranny.
false
they revolted against taxation without representation and not just merely "taxes and bullshit"
I have to say I honestly pity you
you're so filled with anger, hatred and loathing and you imagine affronts and injustices that dont' even exist and work yourself in a frenzy
How is it possible for you to even get to sleep at night
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so... is this one continuious meltdown or can i file this as a seperate one from yesterday?
Or is your life as a whole a meltdown. Please clarify this.
his life is in permanent meltdown
It's usually only the old farts who are retired and have nothing better to do that spend all day ranting about the government
It's kind of weird when it's a 30 something dude who supposedly has a job, relationship, etc.. has the time for such dedication to being angry and ranting about it non-stop 24/7
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Jun 29, 3:10 PM EDT
Roberts jokes about trip to 'impregnable' fortress
By JOE MANDAK
Associated Press
AP Photo/Ann Wilkins
FARMINGTON, Pa. (AP) -- U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts joked that he'll spend some time on an "impregnable island fortress" now that the court has ended a session that featured him casting the decisive vote to uphold President Barack Obama's health care law.
Responding to a question about his summer break, Roberts said he planned to teach a class for two weeks in Malta, the Mediterranean island nation.
"Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress. It seemed like a good idea," Roberts said, drawing laughter from about 300 judges, attorneys and others attending a four-day conference Friday at a posh southwestern Pennsylvania resort.
Roberts appeared Friday at a conference hosted by the Judicial Conference of the District of Columbia Circuit, one day after the Supreme Court said the federal government can require citizens to buy health insurance. The impromptu 35-minute session featured Roberts answering alternating questions from Chief Judge David B. Sentelle, of the D.C. Circuit Court, and Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who heads the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Neither judge asked Roberts directly about the health care decision.
Rather, Roberts responded with the Malta quip after Sentelle asked him whether he was "going to Disney World" now that the court has adjourned for the summer.
The only direct question Roberts got about the health care opinion came when those at the conference were invited to ask questions.
That's when Roberts was asked what he thought his court's legacy would be in 50 years and "how one recent opinion might fit into that" - an obvious reference to the health care decision.
"Well, I won't answer anything that has to do with the second part of that," Roberts said. But he said he hopes that the court under him is remembered as one that "did our job according to the Constitution, of protecting equal justice under the law."
Lamberth hinted at the controversial decision when he asked Roberts if it bothered him that he can't respond to his critics.
"No," Roberts said, his brief answer hanging in the air to more laughter.
The conference at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort and Spa, about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, was entitled "Science and the Law." It focused on how social sciences and psychology affect the way the courts are perceived by the public, as well as how judges go about making decisions when such sciences come into play.
Roberts wasn't asked about those subjects. Instead, he answered more than a dozen questions ranging from how he decides to assign cases to his colleagues to whether social media activity is a problem among Supreme Court law clerks.
"The flat rule is `don't do it,' but we haven't had any situations come up," Roberts said.
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He should stay there for the treason he committed.
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Chief Justice Roberts: It's Not A Tax, It Is A Tax; It's Law, But It's Not 'Unlawful' to Break It
CNS News ^ | June 28, 2012 | Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted on Friday, June 29, 2012 1:23:10
In his deciding opinion in the cases challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare), Chief Justice John Roberts first says the mandate in the law requiring individuals to buy health insurance is not a tax.
Then he says it is a tax.
He upholds the individual mandate—as a tax, not a penalty—as the law of the land. But then says it would not be "unlawful" for Americans to violate the law's mandate that they "shall" buy health insurance--as long as they are willing to pay the "penalty" for not obeying the law.
Roberts first examines the question of whether the Anti-Injunction Act prohibits Americans from bringing suit against Obamacare at this time.
“The Anti-Injunction Act provides that ‘no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against whom such tax was assessed,’” Roberts explains.
“Amicus contends that the Internal Revenue Code treats the penalty as a tax, and that the Anti-Injunction Act therefore bars this suit,” says Roberts.
“The text of the pertinent statutes suggests otherwise,” Roberts continues. "The Anti-Injunction Act applies to suits ‘for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax.’ Congress, however, chose to describe the ‘hared responsibility payment’ imposed on those who forgo health insurance not as a ‘tax,’ but as a ‘penalty.’ There is no immediate reason to think that a statute applying to ‘any tax’ would apply to a ‘penalty.’
“Congress’s decision to label this exaction a ‘penalty’ rather than a ‘tax’ is significant because the Affordable Care Act describes many other exactions it creates as ‘taxes,’” said Roberts.
Roberts thus concludes that because Congress calls the penalty for not complying with the individual mandate a “penalty” not a “tax,” the "penalty" therefore is not a "tax."
“The Affordable Care Act does not require that the penalty for failing to comply with the individual mandate be treated as a tax for purposes of the Anti-injunction Act,” writes Roberts. “The Anti-Injunction Act therefore does not apply to this suit, and we may proceed to the merits.”
Got it? The chief justice of the United States says the penalty for not obeying the individual mandate is not a tax, it's a penalty. Therefore, the court can rule on it at this time.
Remember: Roberts says, It's not a tax, it's a penalty.
Roberts then rules that the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states, cannot be used to justify a law forcing people to buy health insurance because people who are not buying health insurance are not engaging in commerce that can be regulated.
"The individual mandate forces individuals into commerce precisely because they elected to refrain from commercial activity," says Roberts. "Such a law cannot be sustained under a clause authorizing Congress to 'regulate Commerce.'"
That's pretty straightforward: Commerce is commerce. Not engaging in commerce is not commerce.
But then the chief justice turns to the question of whether the Obama Administration can use the Taxing Clause of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to justify imposing the individual mandate to buy health insurance.
Now, the "penalty" which Roberts says was not a "tax" in the first part of his opinion becomes a "tax" in this part of his decision.
“The Government’s tax power argument asks us to view the statute differently than we did in considering its commerce power theory,” writes Roberts. “In making its Commerce Clause argument, the Government defended the mandate as a regulation requiring individuals to purchase health insurance. The Government does not claim that the taxing power allows Congress to issue such a command. Instead, the Government asks us to read the mandate not as ordering individuals to buy insurance, but rather as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.”
“The most straightforward reading of the mandate is that it commands individuals to purchase insurance,” Roberts says as he begins the process by which he transforms the “penalty” he discussed earlier into the "tax" he will discuss now.
“After all, it states that individuals ‘shall’ maintain health insurance,” Roberts continues. “Congress thought it could enact such a command under the Commerce Clause, and the Government primarily defended the law on that basis. But, for the reasons explained above, the Commerce Clause does not give Congress that power. Under our precedent, it is therefore necessary to ask whether the Government’s alternative reading of the statute—that it only imposes a tax on those without insurance—is a reasonable one.
“Under the mandate, if an individual does not maintain health insurance, the only consequence is that he must make an additional payment to the IRS when he pays his taxes,” says Roberts. “That, according to the Government, means the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition—not owning health insurance—that triggers a tax—the required payment to the IRS. Under that theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. And if the mandate is in effect just a tax hike on certain taxpayers who do not have health insurance, it may be within Congress’s constitutional power to tax.”
Roberts then reflects back on the stubborn fact that the law Congress actually enacted specifically calls the “penalty” a “penalty” and not a "tax."
“It is of course true that the Act describes the payment as a ‘penalty,’ not a ‘tax,” says Roberts. “But while that label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act, it does not determine whether the payment may be viewed as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power.”
Roberts then concludes that he while he considered the "penalty' and "penalty" in determining that his court could take up Obamcare and rule on it, he will now consider the “penalty” a “tax” for purposes of allowing Congress to force people to buy health insurance.
“The same analysis here suggests that the shared responsibility payment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax, not a penalty,” he says.
He then further concludes that it would not be “unlawful” for Americans to disobey the law’s declaration that they “shall” buy health insurance, so long as they pay the "penalty"—or, strike that, the "tax"--for disobeying the law's unambiguous mandate.
“While the individual mandate clearly aims to induce the purchase of health insurance, it need not be read to declare that failing to do so is unlawful,” says Roberts. “Neither the Act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insurance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS.
In the end, then, for those who actually have to pay it for exercising their freedom in not buying the health insurance the government says they "shall" buy, it is neither a "penalty" nor a "tax," but merely a required "payment to the IRS."
Roberts graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He was appointed chief justice by President George W. Bush.
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His mind was made up long before he researched this case.
What a ludicrous ruling he made.
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An Act of Great Cunning
Paul A. Rahe · 22 hours ago
What did John Roberts have in mind? Under Obamacare, the penalty exacted on those who do not secure health insurance for themselves was, as its proponents argued, a fine, not a tax. This is not a matter of mere semantics. We may tax what people own, and we regularly tax what they do – import goods, earn a living, sell stocks at a profit, and so forth. We do not tax our fellow citizens for what they do not do. To do so would be tyrannical. It would be to assert a power to penalize people through the tax code for minding their own business. Given the debate that took place when the bill was passed, no honest man could think the mandate a tax.
Most conservatives understand this, and they therefore suspect that John Roberts did not have the stomach to confront the President and his party. See, for example, Joel Pollak’s post Did Roberts Give in to Obama’s Bullying? Moreover, there is evidence that the opinion authored by Justice Scalia was originally a majority opinion. Roberts was forced to back off. His was an act of judicial cowardice.
Or was it merely a recognition of the weakness of the judicial branch? After all, the Chief Justice had his reasons. The Supreme Court confronted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it very nearly lost its independence. A switch in time saved nine, as they say. Roberts is very much concerned with sustaining the legitimacy and influence of the Court, and Obama and the Democrats have made it clear that they would regard a decision overturning Obamacare as a declaration of war.
There is, I am confident, more to it than this. In his opinion, the Chief Justice affirmed the principle asserted by Justices Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas. He made it clear that the commerce clause does not give Congress authority over economic activity that we do not engage in. He also made it clear that the necessary and proper clause cannot be applied to achieve this end. In short, he joined these four Justices in setting a clear limit to the commerce clause, and he paved the way for future challenges to extensions of the regulatory state.
At the same time, he dodged the political firestorm, and nearly all of the liberals who have commented on the matter – a slow-thinking lot, in my opinion – have applauded what they take to be cowardice on his part as “judiciousness.” Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit was among the first to recognize that Roberts might be playing an elaborate game. He compared the decision to Marbury v. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall surrendered in the case before the court while firmly and eloquently reasserting the Court’s right and responsibility to engage in judicial review; and Reynolds pointed to one crucial fact: Senate rules do not allow a filibuster when the bill under consideration has to do with imposing or repealing a tax. If the Republicans take the Senate and the Presidency, they can now repeal the individual mandate. They will not need sixty votes.
Here and there a few commentators have begun to recognize what Roberts did. In a piece entitled Obama Wins the Battle, Roberts Wins the War, Tom Scocca rightly marvels at Roberts’ genius. But perhaps the best discussion is to be found in Ezra Klein’s The Political Genius of John Roberts. “He made it a point to affirm the once-radical arguments that animated the conservative challenge to the legislation,” Klein writes. “But then he upheld it on a technicality.”
By voting with the liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Roberts has put himself above partisan reproach. No one can accuse Roberts of ruling as a movement conservative. He’s made himself bulletproof against insinuations that he’s animated by party allegiances.
But by voting with the conservatives on every major legal question before the court, he nevertheless furthered the major conservative projects before the court — namely, imposing limits on federal power. And by securing his own reputation for impartiality, he made his own advocacy in those areas much more effective. If, in the future, Roberts leads the court in cases that more radically constrain the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce, today’s decision will help insulate him from criticism. And he did it while rendering a decision that Democrats are applauding.
“For those of us who oppose the Affordable Care Act as a policy matter, this is a bad day,” Barnett said. “For those of us in this fight to preserve the limits of constitutional government, this is not a bad day.”
You should read the whole thing. Klein, who founded Journolist, may be a partisan hack – only the delusional left regards the arguments advanced by Scalia as radical – but Klein is not a complete idiot.
There, let me add, is one other possibility. The version of Obamacare that became law originated in the Senate. The Constitution stipulates that all tax bills must originate in the House. Were I Randy Barnett, I would file another suit arguing that the mandate is unconstitutional because the Senate cannot originate tax bills.
So there are reasons for hope. That having been said, the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Roberts caved, and if the Republicans do not take the Senate and the Presidency we are cooked. FDR casts a long shadow. The Supreme Court will not defend the Constitution against a determined Democratic Party. This coming election is arguably the most important such contest in one hundred years.
Update: Here is another piece you might want to read.
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/An-Act-of-Great-Cunning/(page)/2
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Campaign 2012
York: Roberts' dodge at heart of Obamacare decision
June 28, 2012
Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner
No one knew it at the time, but the key moment in the Supreme Court Obamacare case came on March 26, the first day of oral arguments, when few people were paying close attention.
Before getting to the heart of the case, the justices first wanted to deal with what seemed to be a side issue: Was the penalty imposed by the individual mandate in Obamacare a tax? If it was, the case would run afoul of a 19th century-law known as the Anti-Injunction Act, which said a tax cannot be challenged in court until someone has actually been forced to pay it. Since the Obamacare mandate wouldn't go into effect until 2014, that would mean there could be no court case until then.
No one had challenged Obamacare on that basis; the challengers wanted the case to go forward now. The White House, having argued strenuously during the Obamacare debate that the penalty wasn't a tax, wanted to go ahead as well. So the court, on its own, tapped a Washington attorney to make the argument that the penalty was a tax and therefore the case should not go ahead.
"The Anti-Injunction Act imposes a 'pay first, litigate later' rule that is central to federal tax assessment and collection," said the lawyer, Robert A. Long, on that first day of oral arguments. "The Act applies to essentially every tax penalty in the Internal Revenue Code. There is no reason to think that Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by [Obamacare]."
After Long made his case, it fell to the administration's lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to argue that no, the mandate was not a tax, and therefore the case was not subject to the Anti-Injunction Act.
At the same time, everyone knew that the next day, when Verrilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, he had as a backup the argument that it was also justified by Congress' power to levy taxes -- in other words, that it was a tax.
Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict right away.
"General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax," Alito said. "Tomorrow you are going to be back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?"
"No," answered Verrilli.
At the time, some observers found the whole thing a little boring; the real action would come the next day, when the court got to the question of whether the Commerce Clause could be stretched to include the individual mandate.
But a lot of those same observers were shocked on Thursday, when Chief Justice John Roberts, rejecting the Commerce Clause argument, agreed with Verrilli that the mandate simultaneously was and was not a tax, and that therefore Obamacare would stand. Roberts joined the court's four liberal justices, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, who seemed prepared to uphold Obamacare under any circumstances.
Roberts' sleight of hand drove his conservative colleagues nuts. "The government and those who support its position on this point make the remarkable argument that [the mandate] is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax for constitutional purposes," wrote dissenters Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. "That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."
After the ruling, Obamacare opponents pointed out the thousands of times the president and Democratic lawmakers had contended that the mandate penalty was not -- repeat, not -- a tax. But it no longer mattered. "Call it what you will," said former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Outside the court, the conservatives who thought they knew Roberts seemed baffled. "For whatever reason, and you'll have to ask Justice Roberts, he re-wrote the statute," said Mike Carvin, who argued against Obamacare in the case. "I'm glad he re-wrote the statute rather than the Constitution, but none of it can pass rational scrutiny."
Maybe rational scrutiny isn't what is called for. If a person wants to do something badly enough, he'll come up with a reason for doing it. John Roberts, apparently, wanted to uphold Obamacare, even if it meant venturing deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/york-roberts-dodge-at-heart-of-obamacare-decision/article/2500925
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reminds me of WMD argument. LOL
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all of you who insisted bush was a conservative - while he spent like a drunken sailor - act surprised that he also chooses a SCOTUS boss who doesn't give a fck about blowing other ppl's money for the next 3 generations.
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all of you who insisted bush was a conservative - while he spent like a drunken sailor - act surprised that he also chooses a SCOTUS boss who doesn't give a fck about blowing other ppl's money for the next 3 generations.
Name the posters who claimed bush was a conservative?
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CBS News: Roberts Was Going to Overturn ObamaCare But Changed His Mind
News Buster.org ^ | July 1, 2012 | Noel Sheppard
CBS News broke a huge story on Sunday's Face the Nation concerning the Supreme Court's Thursday ruling on ObamaCare.
According to Jan Crawford, CBS legal and political correspondent, Chief Justice John Roberts was initially going to strike down the individual mandate requiring citizens to buy health insurance, but changed his mind over the objections of the conservatives on the Court (video follows with transcript):
CBS News: Roberts Initially Wanted to Strike Down ObamaCare Mandate But Changed His Mind
NORAH O’DONNELL, SUBSTITUTE HOST: We're going to start first with Jan because you've done some reporting. The big question was why did Chief Justice John Roberts do what he did? And you've learned some new details right?
JAN CRAWFORD, CBS LEGAL AND POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's right. What was striking about this decision was that it was the conservative Chief Justice that was providing that decisive fifth vote, joining the liberals to uphold the President’s signature achievement. And Norah that was something that no one would have expected back in 2005 when President George W. Bush put him on the Supreme Court, and that was something that not even the conservative justices expected back in March when the Court heard arguments in this case.
I am told by two sources with specific knowledge of the Court's deliberations that Roberts initially sided with the conservatives in this case and was prepared to strike down the heart of this law, the so-called individual mandate, of course, that requires all Americans to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But Roberts, I'm told by my sources, changed his views deciding to instead join with the liberals.
And he withstood-- I'm told by my sources -- a month-long desperate campaign by the conservative justices to bring him back to the fold, and that campaign was led, ironically, by Justice Anthony Kennedy. And why that's ironic is because it was Justice Kennedy that conservatives feared would be the one most likely to defect. But their effort, of course, was unsuccessful. Roberts did not budge. The conservatives wrote that astonishing joint dissent united in opposition, and Roberts wrote the majority opinion with the four liberals to uphold the President's signature achievement.
O’DONNELL: Has this there been anything like this on the Court before? I mean, that's extraordinary that the Chief Justice, according to your report about a month ago decided to do this and then was lobbied unsuccessfully.
CRAWFORD: Yes, that has happened before, and often in high-profile, controversial cases including Justice Kennedy who's changed his views in a very high-profile case involving a woman's rights on abortion back in 1992. And justices do change their mind. There is precedent for that. One justice told me that surprisingly enough it happens about once a term. But in the case of this magnitude with so much on the line, conservatives believed they had Roberts’ vote in this case, and there's quite a lot of anger within the hallways of the Supreme Court right now.
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Disgusting. Rot in hell Roberts.
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THE ROBERTS DOCTRINE
boblonsberry.com ^ | 06/29/12 | Bob Lonsberry
Posted on Friday, June 29, 2012 8:52:59 AM by shortstop
There’s a reason no one expected this decision.
It’s because it makes no sense.
It’s not a rational view, it’s not consistent with any of the pleadings, it violates about 200 years of Supreme Court procedure.
And it sets the Constitution on its ear.
In a decision penned by the chief justice of the United States, the court has not only legislated, it has levied a tax. In support of an imperial presidency, it has become sovereign itself.
Precedent is abandoned, rule of law is ignored, jurisprudence is bastardized.
Obama wins and liberty loses.
The government is more powerful, the people are less free, and the Constitution is usurped.
Because the Supreme Court very oddly took an unexpected left turn. And to justify it, the chief justice produced a theory of law which had been raised by neither side, which strains credibility, and which unleashes a previously unimagined federal power.
The power to command a purchase, and to impose a punitive tax on those who fail to obey. Such penalties have previously been seen as fines, not taxes, but the chief justice declared them taxes and, with his liberal friends, imposed the biggest one in the history of the world.
Which plays fast and loose with Article 1 Section 7, which says all revenue bills must arise in the House of Representatives.
The people can only be taxed by the initiative of the most democratic portion of government.
Unless John Roberts decides to suspend the rules. In which case he and his liberal friends can do whatever the hell they want to.
Including redefine the concept of judicial review as understood since the days of Marbury v. Madison. In that landmark case from 210 years ago, the power of the federal courts to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress was established.
But after yesterday, that’s passé.
Gone are the days of judicial review, come now are the days of judicial rewrite. Instead of declaring a piece of legislation defective, the Supreme Court now takes to itself the power to correct it.
Why leave that matter to the people’s elected representatives when you have an all-knowing court to attend to it?
The chief justice declared that the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause was not constitutional. But, a tax imposed upon the same lines would be acceptable under the It’s None Of Your Damn Business Clause. So the Supreme Court rewrote the Obamacare law to delete the individual mandate and replace it with a corresponding tax.
Judicial review stops when you declare the individual mandate defective. Judicial rewrite begins when you replace it with something you like better.
Forget all that stuff you learned in elementary school about how a bill becomes a law. Under the Roberts Doctrine, the law is whatever five judgetards say it is. Forget the filibuster and the presidential signature, the chief justice has got it covered.
It’s like a plate umpire in baseball, calling balls and strikes. Only one day the pitcher throws the ball, you swing at it and miss, and a strike is called, and something very unusual happens.
The umpire steps out from behind the plate, stands behind you, moves your feet, fixes your crouch, adjusts your grip, tells you how to swing, and then orders the last pitch to be played over while he, holding your hands, swings and hits.
And scores it a homerun.
That’s what the Roberts Five did yesterday.
They cheated. And they did it to enlarge the power of the central government, to increase the tax burden of the American people, and diminish the freedom of the average citizen. You will pay more, choose less and have lower-quality health care. It’s the trifecta of oppression.
Obamacare is a monstrosity, a direct attack on the fundamental American notion of limited government. But its twin evil is a Supreme Court gone rogue, pulling legal arguments out of thin air to justify its capricious acts.
Yesterday was dangerous not so much for what it did, but for what it allows. It allows generations of future despots to claim newer and more sinister powers. History may well show that the assailant of liberty in this entire transaction was not Barack Obama, but John Roberts.
The fate of Obamacare will be determined, as it should be, by the people, at the ballot box in November. This election will be a referendum on Obamacare and the proper role of government. Those who favor Obamacare and a domineering central government will vote for Obama and the Democrats. Those who favor personal freedom and oppose Obamacare will vote for Romney and the Republicans.
Ultimately, the constitutional accountability of the ballot will determine the future of Obamacare.
But John Roberts and his confederates know no such accountability. The precedent of yesterday – the concept of judicial rewrite – and the notion that tax can be used as a punishment for those who fail to buy a government-mandated product, those judicial misdeeds will cast long shadows.
It was a decision no one saw coming.
Because it is illogical, unprecedented and un-American.
But it is the law of the land.
Thanks to John Roberts.
The dweeb who would be king.
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Roberts did not change
American Thinker ^ | July 1, 2012 | Michael J. Fahy
Posted on Sunday, July 01, 2012 11:10:34 AM by DManA
If you wish to understand Thursday's incoherent opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, you must first know Republican history from the Summer of 2005.
Contrary to most that has been written since Thursday's enactment of RobertsCare, Chief Justice John Roberts did not change. He has always been that way. Eight years ago, when John Roberts was nominated, we were warned that he was a liberal jurist appointed by a RINO president, just as liberal David Souter was appointed by the previous RINO president. Two articles in July 2005 by Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter foretold the Souter-like liberal jurisprudence of Justice Roberts. We now know that Shapiro and Coulter were 100% correct.
President Bush's Roberts Pick Disappoints was written by Ben Shapiro on 7/20/5. Pull quote: "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."
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/roberts_did_not_change.html##ixzz1zNqrpjrj
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
FUGWB - miserable RINO failure
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I don't care what any of you say, I place 75% of blame on George W. Bush. He's the one that opened Pandora's box.
Fuck him
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“Absurd”… “Internally Contradictory”.
skipmaclure.us ^ | July 1 2012 | Skip MacLure
Posted on Sunday, July 01, 2012 10:03:47 AM by Atlanticist.us
It’s a tax… it’s a penalty… no, wait…it’s a tax. Chief Justice John Roberts turned the Constitution and the Supreme Court on its head with a not-quite-coherent opinion in which he managed a tortured interpretation of the Obamacare Act, which was clearly intended to save the most detested piece of legislation since prohibition.
The temptation to jump on my keyboard as soon as I heard the announcement was severe. As with most news events, I prefer to wait until the immediate coverage has sorted itself from the garbage which so often accompanies events such as this. I’m glad I did. It gave me the opportunity to listen to the opinions of one of the true experts on the Constitution and Constitutional law in this country, Mark Levin.
For those of you seeking information you could not find a better, more coherent source than Mr Levin. His book, ‘Men in Black’, is a compelling look at the Supremes and their relationship to jurisprudence and the Constitution. His book,’Liberty and Tyranny’, is a tour de force which offers a compelling insight into the minds and actions of those who would destroy America as we know it.
Mark was as close to ballistic in his treatment and analysis of the Roberts decision as anything I’ve ever heard him say or write. Words such as “Mickey Mouse”… and… “There’s nothing redeeming about Obamacare, nothing”. To say that he filetted the opinion of the Chief Justice is a wild understatement.
Roberts found a political reason to render the judgement as he did. Had he not convoluted his reasoning along the tortuous path he chose, Obamacare would have gone down in the flames it so richly deserves. As it is, Roberts’ legacy to the court and the nation is going to be one of eternal vigilance on our part. The usual beltway pundits are falling all over themselves to posit this mess as some sort of conservative victory.
The only victory here is that there’s probably nothing that could have galvanized an already aroused conservative patriot populace more. Everything I’m hearing out here and reading online indicates a real anger over upholding a clearly unconstitutional law, which was passed in the ‘dark of night’ without a single Republican vote and not a single committee hearing.
For myself, November just can’t get here fast enough.
Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis
© Skip MacLure 2012
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July 1, 2012 1:29 PM
Roberts switched views to uphold health care law
By Jan Crawford .
(CBS News) Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."
The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.
Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.
The inner-workings of the Supreme Court are almost impossible to penetrate. The Court's private conferences, when the justices discuss cases and cast their initial votes, include only the nine members - no law clerks or secretaries are permitted. The justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential.
But in this closely-watched case, word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the Court, and is known among law clerks, chambers' aides and secretaries. It also has stirred the ire of the conservative justices, who believed Roberts was standing with them.
After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate. There were other issues being argued - severability and the Medicaid extension - but the mandate was the ballgame.
It required individuals to buy insurance or pay a penalty. Congress had never before in the history of the nation ordered Americans to buy a product from a private company as part of its broad powers to regulate commerce. Opponents argued that the law exceeded Congress' power under the Constitution, and an Atlanta-based federal appeals court agreed.
The Atlanta-based federal appeals court said Congress didn't have that kind of expansive power, and it struck down the mandate as unconstitutional.
On this point - Congress' commerce power - Roberts agreed. In the Court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.
Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.
Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the Court's historic decision. He kept it for himself.
Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it.
Some of the conservatives, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, deliberately avoid news articles on the Court when issues are pending (and avoid some publications altogether, such as The New York Times). They've explained that they don't want to be influenced by outside opinion or feel pressure from outlets that are perceived as liberal.
But Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As Chief Justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the Court, and he also is sensitive to how the Court is perceived by the public.
There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the Court - and to Roberts' reputation - if the Court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the President himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.
Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.
It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, "wobbly," the sources said.
It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.
Some informed observers outside the Court flatly reject the idea that Roberts buckled to liberal pressure, or was stared down by the President. They instead believe that Roberts realized the historical consequences of a ruling striking down the landmark health care law. There was no doctrinal background for the Court to fall back on - nothing in prior Supreme Court cases - to say the individual mandate crossed a constitutional line.
The case raised entirely new issues of power. Never before had Congress tried to force Americans to buy a private product; as a result, never before had the Court ruled Congress lacked that power. It was completely uncharted waters.
To strike down the mandate as exceeding the Commerce Clause, the Court would have to craft a new theory, which could have opened it up to criticism that it reached out to declare the President' health care law unconstitutional.
Roberts was willing to draw that line, but in a way that decided future cases, and not the massive health care case.
Moreover, there are passages in Roberts' opinion that are consistent with his views that unelected judges have assumed too much power over American life, and that courts generally should take a back seat to elected officials, who are closer to the people and can be voted out of office if the people don't like what they're doing.
As Roberts explained in his opinion:
"The framers created a federal government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people."
Regardless of his thinking, it was clear to the conservatives that Roberts wanted the Court out of the red-hot dispute.
Roberts had begun to focus on a different argument to uphold the law and the mandate's penalty by defining it as a tax. That strained argument had received almost no attention in the lower courts, which had uniformly rejected it. It was seen as a long-shot by the law's supporters.
It would have been far easier, legally, for Roberts to have followed the rationale of two conservatives who voted to uphold the law in the lower courts: Appeals Court Judges Laurence Silberman and Jeffrey Sutton.
In separate opinions for the D.C.- and Cincinnati-based federal courts, Silberman and Sutton wrote that the mandate had not exceeded Congress' commerce power.
Roberts surely could have gotten the liberals to join a decision that the mandate was similar to a 1942 Commerce Clause case involving a farmer who was producing wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it. In that seminal case, the Court ruled the farmer's wheat production nonetheless affected Commerce, and Congress therefore could regulate it.
In the health care case, since no one was urging the Court to overturn that precedent (Wickard v Filburn), the Court could have issued a narrow opinion. It could have ruled that since it wasn't being asked to depart from settled law, the health care act would stand, based on prior precedents.
Instead, Roberts focused the majority opinion on a much more difficult legal proposition: the tax power.
But Roberts also would limit Congress' authority in future cases under the commerce power.
Roberts then engaged in his own lobbying effort - trying to persuade at least Justice Kennedy to join his decision so the Court would appear more united in the case. There was a fair amount of give-and-take with Kennedy and other justices, the sources said. One justice, a source said, described it as "arm-twisting."
Even in Roberts' opinion, which was circulated among the justices in early June, there are phrases that appear tailored to get Kennedy's vote. Roberts even used some of the same language that Kennedy used during oral arguments.
During the arguments in March, Kennedy told Solicitor General Donald Verrilli:
"Here the government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases - and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way."
Roberts wrote in the section of his opinion analyzing the Commerce Clause:
"Accepting the government's theory would give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the federal government."
On the surface, Kennedy would appear to have been Roberts' best shot to persuade. The other three justices - Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito - are seen as more solidly conservative and much less susceptible to pressure.
After all, it was Kennedy who "betrayed" conservatives in 1992, when he flipped his vote in a key abortion case that could have overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that guaranteed a woman's right to abortion.
In the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kennedy initially was with conservatives, but then forged a last-minute alliance with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to put Roe v. Wade on more solid ground than even the original decision itself.
Kennedy has long frustrated conservatives, because he occasionally joins with liberals to provide the key swing vote in cases involving social issues. They openly mock his writing style as grandiose and his jurisprudence as squishy - in other words, changeable and too moderate.
That's not entirely fair to Kennedy. In fact, there are underlying and consistent themes in his jurisprudence, much more so than in the jurisprudence of O'Connor. Kennedy has a libertarian streak, and he is skeptical of expansive government power over individuals. In fact, if there's an issue of an individual versus invasive government, Kennedy sides with the individual.
As a result, Kennedy supports the right to possess a firearm for self-defense AND a woman's right in the context of abortion. He opposes certain laws that discriminate against homosexuals or restrict a person's freedom of speech.
Kennedy also is strong on issues of federalism - and is remarkably consistent. His opinion in a 1999 case, Alden v. Maine, is considered one of the Court's finest in that area. Ruling that states were immune from private lawsuits in state courts, Kennedy wrote: "Sovereign immunity derives not from the Eleventh Amendment but from the federal structure of the original Constitution itself."
And in a 1995 term limits case, when the Court rejected state efforts to impose term limits on Members of Congress, Kennedy wrote a separate, concurring opinion to make a point about federalism:
"Federalism was our nation's own discovery. The framers split the atom of sovereignty . . . It was the genius of their idea that our citizens would have two political capacities, one state and one federal, each protected from incursion by the other."
Those structural boundaries, Kennedy believes, help protect the individual from runaway government power, and are key components to protecting liberty.
All of that dovetails with Kennedy's position on the individual mandate in the health care law. Close associates of Kennedy never thought he would waver in the case once he recognized the federal mandate as an encroachment on individual liberty (points Kennedy later would make in his sections of the joint dissent).
In fact, Kennedy was the most forceful and engaged of all the conservatives in trying to persuade Roberts to stand firm to strike down the mandate. Two sources confirm that he didn't give up until the very end.
But Roberts didn't focus entirely on Kennedy, the sources said. He tried to persuade the conservatives to join at least the parts of his opinion with which they agreed, such as his Commerce Clause analysis.
"People, for good reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures - joined with the similar failures of others - can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce," Roberts wrote in his opinion. "Under the government's logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the government would have them act.
"That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envision," Roberts wrote.
But despite Roberts' strong language on the Commerce Clause, the conservatives would have none of it, the two sources said, even though there was no significant difference in their reasoning on that issue.
Indeed, since the four conservatives agreed the mandate went beyond the commerce power, the Court now has five Justices who would constrain what Congress can do going forward - imposing significant limits on federal power.
The majority decisions were due on June 1, and the dissenters set about writing a response, due on June 15. The sources say they divided up parts of the opinion, with Kennedy and Scalia doing the bulk of the writing.
The two sources say suggestions that parts of the dissent were originally Roberts' actual majority decision for the Court are inaccurate, and that the dissent was a true joint effort.
The fact that the joint dissent doesn't mention Roberts' majority was not a sign of sloppiness, the sources said, but instead was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him.
The language in the dissent was sweeping, arguing the Court was overreaching in the name of restraint and ignoring key structural protections in the Constitution. There are clear elements of Scalia - and then, there is Justice Kennedy.
"The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty in peril," the dissent said. "Today's decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead our judgment today has disregarded it."
http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-3460_162-57464549.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Speechless over this treason.
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/chuck-schumer-john-roberts-broke-promise-commerce-clause-health-care-wickard-filburn-gonzales-raich.php
Incredible. These communists are pissed off Roberts did not go far enough. Unreal.
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A Vast New Taxing Power
The Chief Justice's ObamaCare ruling is far from the check on Congress of right-left myth..
The commentary on John Roberts's solo walk into the Affordable Care Act wilderness is converging on a common theme: The Chief Justice is a genius. All of a sudden he is a chessmaster, a statesman, a Burkean minimalist, a battle-loser but war-winner, a Daniel Webster for our times.
Now that we've had more time to take in Chief Justice Roberts's reasoning, we have a better summary: politician. In fact, his 5-4 ruling validating the constitutional arguments against purchase mandates and 5-4 ruling endorsing them as taxes is far more dangerous, and far more political, even than it first appeared last week.
This is a minority view. By right-left acclaim, at least among elites, the Chief Justice has engineered a Marbury v. Madison-like verdict that camouflages new limits on federal power as a reprieve for President Obama's entitlement legacy and in a stroke enhanced the Supreme Court's reputation—and his own. This purported "long game" appeals to conservatives who can console themselves with a moral victory, while the liberals who like to assail the Chief Justice as a radical foe of democracy can continue their tantrum.
It's an elegant theory whose only flaw is that it is repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts's own language and logic. His gambit substitutes one unconstitutional expansion of government power for another and rearranges the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system.
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His first error is the act of rewriting the plain text of a law, instead of practicing the disinterested interpretation that is the task of the judiciary, regardless of the partisan outcome. The second error is converting the health insurance mandate's penalty into a tax. Ninety years of precedents have honed precise and widely divergent legal meanings for taxes and penalties for violating laws or regulations, and they are not interchangeable.
The Chief Justice did not simply change a label—as if Congress said something was a penalty when it was really a tax. Rather, these categories are defined by their purposes and effects, by how they operate in practice. Taxes are "exactions" whose main goal is raising revenue, while penalties punish individuals for breaking the law. The boundaries can blur—legitimate taxes may also have strong punitive aims—but scarcely so in this case. ObamaCare's mandate was designed to regulate individual conduct to help achieve universal coverage. If it succeeds perfectly, it should collect $0.
Even if Democrats had passed the mandate tax as rewritten by the Chief Justice, and they did not, the Supreme Court until Thursday has never held that Congress can call anything it wants a tax. The taxing power like the Commerce Clause is broad, and the courts are generally deferential. But all powers the Constitution enumerates are also limited, and these limits—unique to each power—must be meaningful and enforceable by the legal system.
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Associated Press
Chief Justice John Roberts.
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The Chief Justice's compounding errors deprive the taxing power of any viable limiting principles. Article I, section 8 gives Congress an independent grant of power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." Taxes must originate in the House, the political body designed to be most responsive to voters. There are also important additional safeguards on the type of exactions known as "direct taxes."
Indirect taxes—"duties, imposts and excises"—are taxes on activities and products. They are passed on by a seller, triggered by a transaction and more or less optional: Consumers don't have to buy taxed goods and services. Direct taxes, on the other hand, are those that the federal government is empowered to impose on individuals as citizens. They cannot be avoided because they are levied on the existence of people.
America has its origins in a rebellion against arbitrary and pernicious taxation and the Framers wanted to make it extremely difficult to impose or raise direct taxes. These can easily morph into plenary police powers, the regulation of private behavior and conduct that the Constitution vests in the states. For this reason, while the taxing power in addition to raising revenue can achieve regulatory results, those regulatory results must be constitutional themselves.
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That boundary held for 225 years until Thursday's ruling, as the Court had repeatedly struck down Congress's efforts to arrogate to itself police powers under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power. The Chief Justice ruled instead that the mandate was an unconstitutional exercise of federal police powers under the Commerce Clause, only to transform the taxing power into a license for the federal government to impose taxes whose defining feature is commanding people as members of society.
Chief Justice Roberts concedes that "Congress's ability to use its taxing power to influence conduct is not without limits" and that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Supreme Court "policed these limits aggressively, invalidating punitive exactions obviously designed to regulate behavior otherwise regarded at the time as beyond federal authority." But then he writes that "more recently we have declined to closely examine the regulatory motive or effect of revenue-raising measures."
His error—or more likely, his deliberate sleight-of-hand—is that this modern jurisprudence does not deal with direct taxes but indirect taxes and income taxes. Income taxes were authorized in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment, which was necessary to bypass the other important limit on direct taxes, called apportionment.
The Constitution says that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken." Colloquially, direct taxes are known as head taxes and they must be spread among the states according to population. Apportionment's onerous limits were meant to protect against abuse and sectional favoritism. If Congress uses direct taxes, the residents of South Carolina will pay the same overall share as Massachusetts, and so forth.
But apportionment would defeat the mandate tax's "whole point," the Chief Justice writes, since every state will have a different percentage of citizens that are uninsured. So he cryptically rules that "A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax."
But if not a direct tax, then what kind of tax is it? It is not an indirect tax because it applies to a failure to purchase something, what the Chief Justice calls "an omission," not an optional transaction. It is not a tax on income because that merely hits "accessions to wealth," not what people choose or choose not to do with those accessions.
The result is that Chief Justice Roberts has created the only tax in U.S. history that exceeds its own constitutional limits and is meant to execute powers that the Court otherwise ruled were invalid. His discovery erases the limiting principle—apportionment—that constrains the taxing power for everything besides income and excises.
In the process, Chief Justice Roberts has hollowed out dual federal-state sovereignty and eviscerated the very limit on the Commerce Clause that he posits elsewhere in his opinion and that has some conservatives singing his praises. From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.
The Chief Justice seems to understand this, so he tries to articulate his own new limiting principle for the tax power. His mandate tax isn't a mandate but merely a suggestion: choose to buy insurance or "pay money into the Federal Treasury, no more," an act he likens to a tax on gasoline. He also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."
True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.
Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.
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The John-Roberts-as-Daniel-Webster school argues that the long-term limits on the Commerce Clause and other aspects of the ruling are a good trade for the loss of upholding ObamaCare, and government excess has now reached its high-water mark and will recede over time. That false hope seems unlikely given the subversion of the taxing power and unleashing a general federal police power. This is equally harmful to liberty and dual sovereignty.
One possible saving grace is that this center-right country remains suspicious of taxation, and therefore the Chief Justice increases accountability somewhat through truth-in-labeling. But note how Democrats are already claiming that the ObamaCare mandate is not really the tax that is the only reason it was upheld.
White House chief of staff Jack Lew said Sunday that "The law is clear. It's called a penalty." Neither sentence is true. On Friday, the Obama re-election "truth team" was even less subtle in a memo titled "They're lying about ObamaCare" that made the same claim. Chief Justice Roberts has created a creature that is not a tax for political purposes but is a tax for constitutional purposes.
Chief Justice Roberts's ruling is careless about these bedrock tax questions, and they are barely addressed by either the Court's liberal or conservative wings. His ruling, with its multiple contradictions and inconsistencies, reads if it were written by someone affronted by the government's core constitutional claims but who wanted to uphold the law anyway to avoid political blowback and thus found a pretext for doing so in the taxing power.
If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked. The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.
"It is not our job," the Chief Justice writes, "to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." But the Court's most important role is to protect liberty when the political branches exceed the Constitution's bounds, not to bless their excesses in the interests of political or personal expediency or both. On one of the most consequential cases he will ever hear, Chief Justice Roberts failed this most basic responsibility.
A version of this article appeared July 2, 2012, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Vast New Taxing Power.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303561504577496603068605864.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
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Judicial Betrayal (Thomas Sowell on John Roberts)
Creators Syndicate ^ | July 3, 2012 | Thomas Sowell
Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington — too often, Republicans — who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness.
President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for reelection by a little known governor from Arkansas.
Chief Justice John Roberts need fear no such fate because he has lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court. But conscience can be a more implacable and inescapable punisher — and should be.
The Chief Justice probably made as good a case as could be made for upholding the constitutionality of ObamaCare by defining one of its key features as a "tax."
The legislation didn't call it a tax and Chief Justice Roberts admitted that this might not be the most "natural" reading of the law. But he fell back on the long-standing principle of judicial interpretation that the courts should not declare a law unconstitutional if it can be reasonably read in a way that would make it constitutional, out of "deference" to the legislative branch of government.
But this question, like so many questions in life, is a matter of degree. How far do you bend over backwards to avoid the obvious, that ObamaCare was an unprecedented extension of federal power over the lives of 300 million Americans today and of generations yet unborn?
These are the people that Chief Justice Roberts betrayed when he declared constitutional something that is nowhere authorized in the Constitution of the United States.
John Roberts is no doubt a brainy man, and that seems to carry a lot of weight among the intelligentsia — despite glaring lessons from history, showing very brainy men creating everything from absurdities to catastrophes. Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.
One of the Chief Justice's admirers said that when others are playing checkers, he is playing chess. How much consolation that will be as a footnote to the story of the decline of individual freedom in America, and the wrecking of the best medical care in the world, is another story.
There are many speculations as to why Chief Justice Roberts did what he did, some attributing noble and far-sighted reasons, and others attributing petty and short-sighted reasons, including personal vanity. But all of that is ultimately irrelevant.
What he did was betray his oath to be faithful to the Constitution of the United States.
Who he betrayed were the hundreds of millions of Americans — past, present and future — whole generations in the past who have fought and died for a freedom that he has put in jeopardy, in a moment of intellectual inspiration and moral forgetfulness, 300 million Americans today whose lives are to be regimented by Washington bureaucrats, and generations yet unborn who may never know the individual freedoms that their ancestors took for granted.
Some claim that Chief Justice Roberts did what he did to save the Supreme Court as an institution from the wrath — and retaliation — of those in Congress who have been railing against Justices who invalidate the laws they have passed. Many in the media and in academia have joined the shrill chorus of those who claim that the Supreme Court does not show proper "deference" to the legislative branch of government.
But what does the Bill of Rights seek to protect the ordinary citizen from? The government! To defer to those who expand government power beyond its constitutional limits is to betray those whose freedom depends on the Bill of Rights.
Similar reasoning was used back in the 1970s to justify the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. Otherwise, it was said, Congress would destroy the Fed's independence, as it can also change the courts' jurisdiction. But is it better for an institution to undermine its own independence, and freedom along with it, while forfeiting the trust of the people in the process?
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Tuesday, Jul 3, 2012 02:13 PM EDT
Roberts wrote both Obamacare opinions
A Court source tells Salon the chief justice wrote the majority opinion and much of the dissent in the ACA case
By Paul Campos
Topics: Affordable Care Act, Healthcare Reform, John Roberts, Supreme Court
(Credit: AP/Keith Srakocic)
This weekend CBS News’ Jan Crawford reported that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote in regard to upholding the bulk of the Affordable Care Act. Crawford reports that Roberts voted with the rest of the court’s conservatives to strike down the individual mandate, but in the course of drafting his opinion changed his mind, and ended up siding with the court’s four liberals to uphold almost all of the law.
In response, according to Crawford’s story, the four conservatives then independently crafted a highly unusual joint dissent. If so, this would represent a powerful symbolic gesture: Joint Supreme Court opinions are rare. Normally a justice authors an individual opinion, which other justices may choose to join. Jointly authored opinions are reserved for momentous statements of principle, such as in Cooper v. Aaron, when all nine justices jointly authored an opinion declaring that the court’s anti-segregation decisions were binding on state governments that disagreed with the court’s constitutional interpretations.
It’s notable that Crawford’s sources insist on the claim that the joint dissent was authored specifically in response to Roberts’ majority opinion, without any participation from him at any point in the drafting process that created it. It would, after all, be fairly preposterous for the four dissenters to jointly “author” an opinion that was in large part written originally by the author of the majority opinion to which the joint dissenters were now so flamboyantly objecting.
Yet that, I am told by a source within the court with direct knowledge of the drafting process, is exactly what happened. My source insists that “most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts’ chambers in April and May.” Only the last portion of what eventually became the joint dissent was drafted without any participation by the chief justice.
This source insists that the claim that the joint dissent was drafted from scratch in June is flatly untrue. Furthermore, the source characterizes claims by Crawford’s sources that “the fact that the joint dissent doesn’t mention [sic] Roberts’ majority … was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him” as “pure propagandistic spin,” meant to explain away the awkward fact that while the first 46 pages of the joint dissent never even mention Roberts’ opinion for the court (this is surely the first time in the court’s history that a dissent has gone on for 13,000 words before getting around to mentioning that it is, in fact, dissenting), the last 19 pages do so repeatedly.
The explanation for this, according to the source, is very simple: Roberts’ chamber did much of the drafting of the former section, and none of the latter. In short, it appears Chief Justice Roberts ended up in large part authoring both the majority opinion and the dissent in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. This would seem to give a whole new meaning to the term “swing justice.”
Close
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More Paul Campos.
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Well, It Worked, Didn't It?
National Review Online ^ | July 2, 2012 | Michael Walsh
Posted on Tuesday, July 03, 2012 5:12:26
President Obama’s public humiliation of the Supreme Court, that is:
[Embedded video]
The Right needs to stop kidding itself that last week’s epic Dolchstoss amounts to anything but a loss: a loss to the country, a loss to the court’s apolitical reputation, and a personal loss for the chief justice, whose legacy now seems permanently sullied. From CBS News:
Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy – believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law – led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
“He was relentless,” one source said of Kennedy’s efforts. “He was very engaged in this.”
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, “You’re on your own.”
Spare me the argument that Roberts, with the ghosts of 1937 tramping through his mind, was trying to “preserve the integrity” of the court. His jaw-dropping, intellectually inconsistent, Kafkaesque ruling in the Obamacare case is likely to live in infamy, much like such earlier Supreme turkeys as the Dred Scott decision and Plessy v. Ferguson. In both of those cases, as in this one, the Court took refuge in legal niceties and sophomoric hairsplitting, refusing to acknowledge the greater moral issue and the looming national catastrophe.
Even if Roberts did make his “switch in time” pusillanimously, to avoid another Obama tongue-lashing and the ill will of the major editorial pages . . . so what? There are times in the affairs of men when business as usual should no longer obtain, and all right-thinking people (including the four justices who voted to strike down the monstrosity) must simply — in one of the Left’s favorite phrases — do the right thing. That Roberts did not will be to his everlasting shame.
Further, it’s not like it won him any good will or Strange New Respect, either from his poisonous colleagues (read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s classic dog-in-the-manager “concurrence”; her shiv-between-the-ribs citation of Romneycare was also a nice touch) or from the New York Times, which thanked him thus:
Six full terms after Justice Samuel Alito Jr. joined the court, the five in the majority have redefined judicial conservatism. The contrast in style and philosophy with the moderate minority is pronounced, including the conservatives’ willingness to flout court rules, constraints of precedent and well-established practices of legal reasoning to reach results they seek.
It is no wonder that the court’s standing in public opinion polls is at its lowest level in a quarter of a century, with just one in eight Americans believing that the justices decide cases based only on legal analysis.
Justice Elena Kagan said last month, dissenting in the crime lab evidence case, that the conservative majority sometimes forsakes “precedent-based decision making,” which guides lower court judges and provides predictability in the justice system. The court reached the right result on the Affordable Care Act, but that ruling was not a sign of change in a strident conservative majority.
You have to love that “moderate minority” phrase, too.
But this is how the Left sees itself — eminently, moderately reasonable, and only driven to extreme “by any means necessary” measures by the intransigence of the Right and for its effrontery in trying to oppose “progress” as they define it.
Until the Right understands that the Left cedes us — as the Times editorial so vividly illustrates — no legitimacy at all it will continue to be surprised by weak men like John Roberts, who allowed a rogue president to publicly browbeat him and the institution he heads — and then, when he had a chance to pay him back, turned tail and ran.
As Kafka wrote in “Zur Frage der Gesteze”: “Was der Adel tut, ist Gesetz” (“Whatever the nobility does is the law.” So start acting accordingly.
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CBS News: Roberts Was Going to Overturn ObamaCare But Changed His Mind
News Buster.org ^ | July 1, 2012 | Noel Sheppard
CBS News broke a huge story on Sunday's Face the Nation concerning the Supreme Court's Thursday ruling on ObamaCare.
According to Jan Crawford, CBS legal and political correspondent, Chief Justice John Roberts was initially going to strike down the individual mandate requiring citizens to buy health insurance, but changed his mind over the objections of the conservatives on the Court (video follows with transcript):
CBS News: Roberts Initially Wanted to Strike Down ObamaCare Mandate But Changed His Mind
NORAH O’DONNELL, SUBSTITUTE HOST: We're going to start first with Jan because you've done some reporting. The big question was why did Chief Justice John Roberts do what he did? And you've learned some new details right?
JAN CRAWFORD, CBS LEGAL AND POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's right. What was striking about this decision was that it was the conservative Chief Justice that was providing that decisive fifth vote, joining the liberals to uphold the President’s signature achievement. And Norah that was something that no one would have expected back in 2005 when President George W. Bush put him on the Supreme Court, and that was something that not even the conservative justices expected back in March when the Court heard arguments in this case.
I am told by two sources with specific knowledge of the Court's deliberations that Roberts initially sided with the conservatives in this case and was prepared to strike down the heart of this law, the so-called individual mandate, of course, that requires all Americans to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But Roberts, I'm told by my sources, changed his views deciding to instead join with the liberals.
And he withstood-- I'm told by my sources -- a month-long desperate campaign by the conservative justices to bring him back to the fold, and that campaign was led, ironically, by Justice Anthony Kennedy. And why that's ironic is because it was Justice Kennedy that conservatives feared would be the one most likely to defect. But their effort, of course, was unsuccessful. Roberts did not budge. The conservatives wrote that astonishing joint dissent united in opposition, and Roberts wrote the majority opinion with the four liberals to uphold the President's signature achievement.
O’DONNELL: Has this there been anything like this on the Court before? I mean, that's extraordinary that the Chief Justice, according to your report about a month ago decided to do this and then was lobbied unsuccessfully.
CRAWFORD: Yes, that has happened before, and often in high-profile, controversial cases including Justice Kennedy who's changed his views in a very high-profile case involving a woman's rights on abortion back in 1992. And justices do change their mind. There is precedent for that. One justice told me that surprisingly enough it happens about once a term. But in the case of this magnitude with so much on the line, conservatives believed they had Roberts’ vote in this case, and there's quite a lot of anger within the hallways of the Supreme Court right now.
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Disgusting. Rot in hell Roberts.
Bump for Team Kenya