Posted on 03/28/2012 12:09:24 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Justices to lawyers: Don't make us read the law
By: Politico Staff March 28, 2012 02:22 PM EDT
So much for “read the bill.”
Three days into oral arguments over President Barack Obama’s health care law, Supreme Court justices made a plea to the lawyers Wednesday: Please don’t make us read it.
Justice Antonin Scalia cut in when Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler said the justices would need to look at “the structure and the text” of the 2,700-page law .
“Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment?” Scalia asked — a joking reference to the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?
“And do you really expect the court to do that? Or do you expect us to — to give this function to our law clerks? Is this not totally unrealistic? That we are going to go through this enormous bill item by item and decide each one?"
Taking a swipe at the court’s textualists, Justice Elena Kagan said the court could dispense with the legislative history and “look at the text that’s actually given us.”
“For some people, we look only at the text,” she said. “It should be easy for Justice Scalia's clerks.”
“I don't care whether it's easy for my clerks,” Scalia said to laughs. “I care whether it's easy for me.”
Although “read the bill” was a rallying cry on the right during the congressional fight over the law, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to acknowledge Wednesday that he hadn’t done so himself.
“Where is this line?” he asked Kneedler at one point. “I looked through the whole Act, I didn't read ... “
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
“We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”
As I’ve said before, “It’s just like a stool sample!”
POST OF THE DAY.
So no one's noticed yet that pages 1350-2200 were written by an automatic internet spam text generator?
http://johno.jsmf.net/knowhow/ngrams/index.php?table=en-dickens-word-2gram¶graphs=2&length=100
I don't do with the landing-place made uncomfortable by hand to him, staring drearily at nought -- all right. Wishing to Miss Havisham's to-morrow morning after slowly search- ing on his leg. A little world in his head over the dinner, consisting of me upside down, and using the marshes with Joe good-night, and a boy.' `With this bleak place overgrown with no doubt of the edge of the leg of reason, religion, and that door to look at his nose and at all, as if Joe looked at these things, seems to sleep I told manner in the instrument.
`Show us home at eight by hand. The sergeant and a frightful chotus; Biddy leading the mud and indeed it was busy apprenticed to me, and nob,' returned the top bar, `rendering unto all the river, still gasped, `He had a penknife from him not being sensible of the dog's way with his arms -- murder me,' returned Mr Wopale's great-aunt, who held a dozen soldiers opened the time I broke out on in the psalm -- and quite un- animously set expression -- clasping himself, as if they challenged, hears nothin' all on the motion with his grey jacket.
Don't look now, but that's exactly what's been happening with this law. Hopeless quantities of ridiculous verbiage is what this already is. I think that's Scalia's point.
More to the point, if the people who VOTED for it didn’t read it, they can’t stand on the legislative history to argue that it’s constitutional!
severability implies modularity. lack of severability does not guarantee modularity. it tends to imply a lack of modularity, deliberate or otherwise.
the liberals who wrote the bill should have forseen the challenge to portions of the bill. they should not be permitted to heap the responsibility on the courts to modularize something for which there was no modularization requirement to begin with. that would require the justices to become (omygosh) legislators.
And yet....I just heard Sen John F Kerry on the radio stating the standard talking point that we would love it once we understood it!
Apparently NO ONE wants to read it, and I’ll bet even if you did, it wouldn’t be understandable, let alone acceptable.
Anyone else think that admitting they didn’t read it will make it a lot harder for them to uphold it? If they did, they’re in the same position as Congress. “We didn’t read it but we’re going to assume everything’s fine.” I would at least predict that any justice who implies they have or will read the whole thing is definitely going to uphold it.
Appeal to whom? It’s the SUPREME COURT.
assuming the law going down in total, this means kagan and sotomayor are exposed as unqualified.
Have you ever seen a flow diagram of the law with all of interactions and feedbacks? With a law as complex as this law is one must have a comprehensive understanding of the entire law before one can render a decision on only a single clause or section.
It's an admission that its parts were never attachable in the first place.
The whole thing is a farce.... it has nothing to do with health care but rather to do with MORE and MORE government interference with ME and MY resources.
If we can prove Obama was never eligible to be president in the first place, does that mean Kagan and the wise Latina would be severable from the court?
How can people who didn’t read it themselves, demand that the Justices should read it?
“But then he asked Kneedler if maybe he and Clement could get together, go through the law and come up with a list of what should stay and what should go.”
Astounding.
ahh clement would say it all goes and therefore there is no agreement
IOW no agreement no law.
“providing affordable healthcare” is just another in the unending line of excuses the left uses to exert more and more control over our lives.
Everyone seems to know that, even the left, though they wouldn’t admit it even if you waterboarded them.
Public Law 89-97, Section 100 Title I -Health Insurance for the Aged and Medical Assistance July 30th, 1965
http://www.brockport.edu/~govdoc/SocPol/pl89-97a.pdf
The original Medicare Act
Is TWO friggin’ pages LONG!!!!!!
Why do We the People keep funding and operating that looney-bin asylum on Capitol Hill in DC!!!!
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