The challenge to the Obamacare mandate, long dismissed by the legal establishment and media as frivolous and almost unworthy of serious consideration, is on the cusp of victory at the Supreme Court.
Credit a few lone legal voices, including at Volokh Conspiracy, with keeping the intellectual pressure on. (added, see Crediting/Blaming the VC for the Possible Defeat of the Individual Mandate)
Cusp does not mean sure thing, but no one who paid attention to three days of oral argument can say that the arguments are frivolous and not worthy of serious consideration. Even the liberal Justices, while throwing lifelines to the Solicitor General, clearly considered the challenges as serious and substantial.
The lifeboats are in the water for Obama and the Democrats as the ship goes down, with Democrats planning to blame the Supreme Court, Dems Warn Of ‘Grave Damage’ To SCOTUS If ‘Obamacare’ Is Struck Down:
“This court would not only have to stretch, it would have to abandon and completely overrule a lot of modern precedent, which would do grave damage to this court, in its credibility and power,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D), a former attorney general of Connecticut. “The court commands no armies, it has no money; it depends for its power on its credibility. The only reason people obey it is because it has that credibility. And the court risks grave damage if it strikes down a statute of this magnitude and importance, and stretches so dramatically and drastically to do it.”
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said the law has been thoroughly vetted.
“As a senior member of the Finance Committee,” he said, “I can tell you that we had one of the most rigorous and transparent legislative processes that I have witnessed in almost 3 decades here in the Congress. We worked with some of the brightest, most thoughtful and experienced constitutional lawyers in order to make sure that the law was constitutional.”
More of the pre-emptive blame game:
- A.J. Dionne, Judicial activists in the Supreme Court
- Jonathan Chait, Conservative Judicial Activists Run Amok
- Dahlia Lithwick, The Supreme Court’s Dark Vision of Freedom
- NY Times Editorial, The Supreme Court’s Momentous Test
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