The meeting’s wrapped and the Washington Post’s brass apparently told Team Romney: Talk to the hand. From the Post’s spokesperson Kris Coratti: “We are very confident in our reporting.”
Pushed back on its heels, Romney camp goes into full ‘Release the Kraken‘ mode against Bain attacks.
Obviously, everybody seems to think the Court either overturns the mandate or overturns the entire law. Intrade at the moment has a 73% chance of the mandate being overturned. Read More
The health care ruling will be announced in the next few hours so this post won’t have a long shelf life. But I think it’s worth breaking down explicitly why even certain conservative legal scholars regard the thought that the Affordable Care Act might disappear today to be so troubling — why it’s not just partisan disagreement all the way down. Read More
We set up a special page for all our coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision on the health care reform law. It has all of our stories on the topic, will have all of the new stories we write today, and on the right-hand side of the page it has our special #HCR/SCOTUS Livewire stream where you can follow all the breaking news in real time.
Of course you can find our coverage in all the usual places, too, but this is a one-stop shop for today’s big news.
Because of the archaic way the Supreme Court releases its decisions, there was lots of initial confusion about what the holding in the case was. We’re still awaiting the actual opinion, but the upshot is that the individual mandate survived under the taxing power of Congress, not under the Commerce Clause. Much more to come soon right here.
Here’s Brian Beutler’s initial report for us on the decision.
I should also refer you back to Brian’s piece after the oral arguments in March where he picked up on John Robert’s possibly tipping his hand on the idea that the mandate is constitutional under Congress’ usual taxing power: “John Roberts May Have Tipped His Hand On ‘Obamacare’ Reasoning.”
I have some thoughts on the politics of this — mainly because the politics is what I have some expertise to speak about. But that will be my next post. Before I do that I wanted to state very clearly that the politics of the decision pales before its substance, a fact that I suspect will get little attention today. This decision will have a massive effect on the lives of literally millions of people. Mitt Romney may have joked yesterday that the White House was “not sleeping real well” last night. But a lot of people tonight and in the future will sleep a lot better for this result. Young people, people with pre-existing conditions and mainly people who through the chaos of the health care market simply find themselves with no coverage. Read More
Via Brian Beutler: “The ruling ends a Quixotic conservative quest to vanquish Obama’s signature achievement by fiat. It also devastates the GOP’s long-standing appeal to voters that the law exists as a monument to liberal overreach, in defiance of accepted limits on federal power. That Roberts, a conservative emissary to the Court, voted to uphold is particularly devastating.”