Free Republic

Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap. “The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate. “The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said. The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance...

This week, the Supreme Court measured Obamacare to see whether it fits within the confines of the Constitution. The big picture is whether the Constitution limits the behavior of the federal government to the plain meaning and historical context of the Constitution, or whether clever lawyers and politicians can interpret language in the Constitution so as to justify whatever Congress wishes to do. Does the Constitution mean what it says? Does it limit the federal government to the powers it has delegated to Congress? Or is it a blank check for Congress to do whatever it can get away with?...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Washington, D.C., the "city of Satan" from the Senate floor on Wednesday while describing the effects of the healthcare law currently under review across the street at the Supreme Court. "It's interesting that the very same organizations that all signed up… and were bludgeoned into supporting ObamaCare… are the same organizations that come to our offices and ask for relief from ObamaCare," said McCain. "It's a fascinating commentary on trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," concluded the senior senator....

The liberal Supreme Court justices have demonstrated profound and shocking ignorance of the American health care system. Here's one of the most jarring examples: "What percentage of the American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that child was turned away because the parent didn't have insurance," asked Sotomayor, "... do you think there's a large percentage of the American population that would stand for the death of that child -- (who) had an allergic reaction and a simple shot would have saved the child?" I have a precise answer for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The...

Democrats are fuming over Justice Antonin Scalia’s conduct during this week’s Supreme Court deliberations on President Obama’s healthcare law. While several of the high court’s liberal justices seemed to cheerlead for its defense, Scalia appeared hostile to the law, an attitude that rubbed some Democrats the wrong way. Scalia mocked the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” without seeming to know that provision was stripped out of the law two years ago. Scalia also joked that the task of having to review the complex bill violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “You really want us to go through these...

Since the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, Swingin' Anthony Kennedy has been the swingingest swinger on the Supreme Court, the big Numero Cinco on all those 5-4 white-knuckle nail-biting final scores. So naturally court observers have been paying close attention to his interventions in the ObamaCare oral arguments. So far he doesn't sound terribly persuaded by the administration's line: "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...

Media coverage now implies that the U.S. Supreme Court will determine the fate of President Obama's health care law. But nothing the court decides will keep the law alive for more than a brief period of time. There are three ways the health care law could meet its end. The first, obviously, is the Supreme Court could declare some or all of it unconstitutional in June. If it gets past that hurdle, the law also could be ended by Election 2012. If a Republican president is elected, the GOP will almost certainly also win control of the Senate and...

Maybe the United States dodged a bullet this week. Make that a deep-penetration bunker buster into the original idea of America. On Tuesday, the justices of the Supreme Court sounded, on balance, to be disposed against affirming the Obama health-care law's mandate. The Obama administration's lawyers argued that the mandate to purchase health insurance is a routine extension of the Commerce Clause, which in the 1930s became the most potent sentence in the U.S. Constitution. It is not a certainty that Tuesday's discussion of the ObamaCare mandate means it will be overturned. It's still worth thinking about the implications if...

A handful of Senate Democrats sought to assure doubtful liberals that the Supreme Court justices aren’t ready to strike down their crowning achievement, standing before cameras and mics Wednesday in front of the court. One warned that doing so would ruin the court’s credibility. “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...

The Obama administration told the Supreme Court this week that the Affordable Care Act's mandate that everyone buy insurance is vital to providing universal coverage and lower insurance costs. But ObamaCare won't solve either problem, as government reports show. Despite the mandate, there will still be 27 million uninsured a decade from now, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The promised uninsured rate — 10% in 2022 — isn't much better than in 1980, when it was 12%, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The law also tries to cut the uninsured population by making it illegal for...

After yesterday’s heartening arguments, today’s arguments carry even more importance, because it seems likely the Court will actually reach the severability question. If there are political consequences for the Court’s decision on the mandate argued yesterday, there could be even more consequences to today’s arguments. If the law is struck down in its entirety, expect the president to dust off his 2010 State of the Union talking points, which charge the Court with what he calls “judicial activism,” but in reality seem to criticize any court decision that finds a law of his unconstitutional. The justices on both sides seemed...

After three days of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Obamcare, liberals seem genuinely stunned that Obamacare has a good chance of going down in flames. They never saw it coming. Consider this exchange between CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and anchor Wolf Blitzer on the first day of the argument which focused on the individual mandate, provision of Obamacare which forces all Americans to purchase medical insurance or procure it via their employers: TOOBIN: This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it's gonna be struck down. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, was...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I talked to the judge last night about severability. Severability is something that I misunderstood. Maybe I'm the only one who did. I don't want to say. I said in the last hour that everybody misunderstood it because of the way it's reported. That may not be the case. I'm sure my legal beagle friends understand it and would not be surprised to hear what the judge told me. People confuse the rule on severability. In this case you have Obamacare and the mandate, and what I always thought severability was, if the Congress puts a clause...

Even before the Supreme Court issues its ruling this June, we have learned a great deal from this process. The long history of Obamacare, hopefully already entering its final months, has been as instructive to the student as it has been devastating on the economy. These are certainly not the only lessons we have learned from it, but here are a few worth remembering. LEGISLATION HAS CONSEQUENCES. Even though Obamacare was frontloaded on taxes and backloaded on benefits – it wouldn’t provide a single dollar of real benefits for four years – its effect on the economy was instantaneous. Within...

After three days of arguments before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration and its supporters have been found in contempt. Not of the court, but of the Constitution. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business challenged the constitutionality of President Obama's signature piece of domestic legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The sophistries on which the Obamaphiles relied to defend their health care power grab were perhaps best summarized by Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick: "That the law is constitutional is best illustrated by the fact that -- until recently -- the Obama administration expended almost...

Now that three days and six sessions of Supreme Court oral argument on ObamaCare have finished, what conclusions can we reach about how the decision will go? Earlier today I spoke with Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University Law Center, who represented the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) in the court challenge to the PPACA, and who attended all six sessions as an observer on their behalf. We spoke about the dangers of making assumptions from oral arguments, the performance of Solicitor General Donald Verilli, and the impact of government regulation on smaller businesses versus larger competitors:

When Obamacare first passed, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incredulously responded to a query about whether the law was constitutional with: "Are you serious?" After Tuesday's oral argument, she might want to revise and extend her remarks; a 5-4 vote seems almost certain based on the tone of the individual justices' questions. The law's proponents had hoped that Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the Raich opinion upholding a federal marijuana prosecution in the face of a state ballot initiative to the contrary, might provide a 6th vote for them. But Justices Scalia, John G. Roberts Jr., and Samuel Alito were highly...

We thought we’d celebrate today, just in case all the indicators prove false and the Supreme Court decides to uphold Obamacare. Judging from the reactions, even on the left, including the left-learning press, it seems likely the justices will put an end to President Barack Obama’s signature legislative triumph – the one you had to pass so you could find out what’s in it. It seems the justices, or at least enough of them, read it and found out. And didn’t much care for what they discovered. Here’s the news . . .

Obamacare: Know your enemy posted at 9:15 am on March 28, 2012 by Steven Den Beste “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” — Sun Tzu Which means you have to know what the enemy’s strategy is. So just what do Obama and the Democrats want out of the SCOTUS review of Obamacare (ACA)? There are three basic questions that the Supreme Court is trying to decide. 1. Should they decide now, or wait? (That was argued on Monday.) 2. If they decide now, then is the individual mandate unconstitutional? (Today.) 3. If the...

At her weekly briefing today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) was asked to opine on the Supreme Court proceedings on the Constitutionality of the health care law passed in 2010 when Democrats were in control of the House. "I'm a supporter of judicial review, I honor the Constitution in that regard," Pelosi said to reporters. "That's why we wrote our bill in a way that was Constitutional. I still feel pretty confident about it. And if and when -- this game is not over. In March Madness, what happens when your team doesn't win one -- well wait a...