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David Horowitz
FrontPageMag.com
6/28/2012
Politically speaking there couldn’t have been a better Supreme Court decision. If Obamacare had been declared unconstitutional, the Democrats’ campaign in November would have been those horrible Republicans have politicized the Supreme Court and denied affordable healthcare to everyone. The focus would be on the court’s “unfairness.” The Democrats would have a plausible if unfair case (and in politics lack of fairness is a given). Advantage Democrats. Advantage because the last things they want to talk about are Obamacare and taxes. And that’s the second big plus from this decision. The focus – thanks to Justice Roberts – is going to be on the biggest tax increase in human history on everyone, not just the rich. And on the lies of Obama which dwarf those of Clinton. Obama promised no tax hikes on the middle class and then defended Obamacare before the Supreme Court as …. a tax.
As for the constitutionalists. Roberts’ argument makes sense to me. Yes the power to tax is the power to destroy, but it’s in the Constitution. So this decision doesn’t really change anything constitutionally. If you don’t like Obamacare, the remedy is to repeal it. Let the elections begin.
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David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”
H/T American Power where there’s much more to read:
I would have preferred personally that Roberts had stood up to the left’s bullying and ideological thuggery — that he would have joined with the four conservatives to strike down the law, as per Anthony Kennedy’s words: “In our view, the entire Act is invalid in its entirety.” But I’m not going to lament how quickly the decision has energized the conservative base. See Roll Call for more: “Health Care Decision Re-Energizes Tea Party.”
Related: Koch-backed group launches $9 million ad campaign against health law
A conservative advocacy group closely aligned with the Tea Party announced a $9 million swing-state push against President Obama and the healthcare law.
The announcement by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which is largely funded by the conservative Koch brothers, comes one day after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the vast majority of the law in a major coup for Obama…
H/T Weasel Zippers
“… it was about limiting the power of the government by overturning the coercive mandate. That objective was not achieved.”I’m just another lawprof, but I think the Commerce Clause decision matters a lot. Yes, Congress can work around its limit by tapping the taxing power, but it’s not politically easy to tax.
