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(Cross-posted at Blog of the Century). The New York Times includes a jaw-dropping op-ed, “Down the insurance rabbit hole,” by MIT political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell. Reflecting on Justice Scalia’s recent professed skepticism about forcing young people to buy insurance that largely subsidizes others, Campbell writes: May the justices please meet my sister-in-law. On Feb. [...]
Archive for the ‘Affordable Care Act’ Category
April 7th, 2012
April 3rd, 2012
Not very much, according to Justice Kennedy. I couldn’t help thinking about the Affordable Care Act cases when reading his opinion for the Court in Florence v. Burlington County, handed down yesterday. The Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not forbid law enforcement from strip searching arrestees even if there is no reason to suspect that they possess [...]
April 2nd, 2012
About a quarter century ago, The New Republic had a contest asking for the record in bad character judgment. Its own example was someone (perhaps Lincoln Steffens) who had described Stalin as “unassuming.” It asked whether any of its readers had a better example. The winner was my friend Gideon Rose, now editor-in-chief of Foreign [...]
March 30th, 2012
Category: Affordable Care Act, Supreme Court
A good day for Aetna. Not so good for the uninsured.
March 28th, 2012
To grasp just how mendacious and incoherent the constitutional argument against the Affordable Care Act is, consider the plaintiffs’ argument today concerning “severability,” that is, whether, if the insurance mandate is struck down, whether the whole Act must be struck down. The mandate is so intimately tied up in the whole scheme, argued lawyer Paul [...]
March 28th, 2012
Who knows what the Court will do with the Affordable Care Act. But these two exchanges, via Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog, seem to sum up the worldview of conservative “jurisprudence:” Justice Kennedy seemed …. [to argue] that the Court would be seen as exercising judicial activism, not restraint, if it allowed some part of the [...]
March 28th, 2012
The benefits of aspirin in pills and vegetables.
March 27th, 2012
From the Associated Press (h/t Sullivan): “If the government can do that, what else can it do?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, referring to the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He then questioned whether Congress could also require individuals to buy vegetables, such as broccoli. There is a straightforward answer to that [...]
March 26th, 2012
Well, when a politically ambitious appellate judge wants to avoid getting himself in trouble. Via Washington Monthly, SCOTUSBlog makes it clear that the Supremes might not even consider the so-called merits of the so-called constitutional questions regarding the Affordable Care Act. That’s because of an old (but still important) federal law called the Anti-Injunction Act, [...]