"The upshot is that Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause to force you
to eat broccoli, but it can tax you into doing so. Huzzah for liberty!"
That's one of the many bits that caught my eye while reading Jonah Goldberg's take on yesterday's ruling over at National Review (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/304363/roberts-s-ruling-took-guts-jonah-goldberg).
Elsewhere, George Will is spinning madly that Roberts' majority opinion was a good thing because it set limits on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. George, I refer you to the quote at the beginning. Great, there are limits to the Commerce Clause for the purpose of Federal overreach; but look, we still have ObamaCare, which was argued on the basis of the Commerce Clause and saved from such argument by Roberts' arguing that the Individual Mandate is actually a tax.
So, George, what is it again that we won?
Another quote from Goldberg's article:
ReplyDelete"Now, I don’t know what’s in Roberts’s heart, but no court watcher I’ve heard from puts much weight on the idea that Roberts did anything other than reason backward from the result he wanted in order to buy respect from the court’s critics at the expense of his own beliefs."
That sums up nicely the myriad of thoughts I had as I read Roberts' opinion for the liberal majority decision.
National Review Online has an excerpt of the dissenting opinion...required reading.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nationalreview.com/articles/304323/no-its-not-tax-samuel-alito
Here is a link to Andrew McCarthy's take on the ruling. He asserts that the whole thing, from the legislation to the ruling, was a fraud; and explains how Roberts had taken it upon himself to literally rewrite the legislation, which he acknowledges was unconstitutional as written and argued, to make it constitutional.
ReplyDeletehttp://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/06/28/obamacare-ruling-pure-fraud-and-no-due-process/